New York is a big, crazy, complicated city. But we love it.
Here we’ve gathered some of the best quotes about New York both positive, negative, and hilarious. I hope you enjoy.
“New York is one of man’s greatest achievements. - Edward Robb Ellis
“A hundred times have I thought New York is a catastrophe, and fifty times: It is a beautiful catastrophe. - Le Corbusier
“If you are greedy for life, that’s what New York is all about. If you’re trying to get as much as you can every day, this city is the place to be.- Pam Nelson
“Make your mark in New York and you are a made man. - Mark Twain
“The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding. - John Updike
“You haven’t lived until you died in New York. - Alexander Woollcott
“New York indeed, resembles a magic cauldron. Those who are cast into it are born again.- Charles Whibley
“If you want to become a real New Yorker, there’s only one rule: You have to believe New York is, has been, and always will be the greatest city on earth. The center of the universe. - Ellen R. Shapiro
“I believe in New Yorkers. Whether they’ve ever questioned the dream in which they live, I wouldn’t know, because I won’t ever dare ask that question. - Dylan Thomas
“One belongs to New York instantly, one belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years. - Tom Wolfe
“If I’d lived in Roman times, I’d have lived in Rome. Where else? Today America is the Roman Empire and New York is Rome itself. - John Lennon
“Once you have lived in New York and it has become your home, no other place is good enough. - John Steinbeck
“I was in love with New York. I do not mean ‘love’ in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and never love anyone quite that way again. - Joan Didion
“It couldn’t have happened anywhere but in little old New York. - O. Henry
“Everybody ought to have a Lower East Side in their life. - Irving Berlin
“And because no matter who you are, if you believe in yourself and your dream, New York will always be the place for you. - Michael Bloomberg
“I adore my apartment in New York. It was a ballroom that I remade, so it’s like a loft but done by Louis the Fifteenth. - Joan Rivers
“There’s something so romantic about being broke in New York. You gotta do it. You have to live there once without any money, and then you have to live there when you have money. Let me tell you, of the two, the latter is far better.- Amy Poehler
“And New York is the most beautiful city in the world? It is not far from it. No urban night is like the night there… Squares after squares of flame, set up and cut into the aether. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will. - Ezra Pound
“The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and beauty in the world. - F. Scott Fitzgerald
“Like a rat in a cage, pulling minimum wage. New York I love you, but you’re bringing me down. - LCD Soundsystem
“I can’t with any conscience argue for New York with anyone. It’s like Calcutta. But I love the city in an emotional, irrational way, like loving your mother or your father even though they’re a drunk or a thief. I’ve loved the city my whole life — to me, it’s like a great woman. - Woody Allen
“In New York I feel plugged into a strong alternating current of hope and despair. - Ted Morgan
“When you leave New York, you are astonished at how clean the rest of the world is. Clean is not enough. - Fran Lebowitz
“To say that New York came up to its advance billing would be the baldest of understatements. Being there was like being in heaven without going to all the bother and expense of dying. - P.G. Wodehouse
“New York walking isn’t exercise: it’s a continually showing make-your-own movie. - Roy Blount Jr.
“My favorite thing about New York is the people, because I think they’re misunderstood. I don’t think people realize how kind New York people are. - Bill Murray
“There is more sophistication and less sense in New York than anywhere else on the globe. - Don Herold
“Better a square foot of New York than all the rest of the world in a lump — better a lamppost on Broadway than the brightest star in the sky. - Texas Guinan
“As for New York City, it is a place apart. There is not its match in any other country in the world. - Pearl S. Buck
“More than anything else New York is a city of superlatives, a place where the best, the brightest, the biggest is the norm. - Marilyn J. Appleberg
“Something’s always happening here. If you’re bored in New York, it’s your own fault.- Myrna Loy
“New York is a different country. Maybe it ought to have a separate government. Everybody thinks differently, they just don’t know what the hell the rest of the United States is. - Henry Ford
“New York blazes like a magnificent jewel in its fit setting of sea, and earth, and stars. - Thomas Wolfe
“New York has a trip-hammer vitality which drives you insane with restlessness if you have no inner stabilizer. - Henry Miller
“There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born here, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size and its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter — the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something. […] Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness; natives give it solidity and continuity; but the settlers give it passion. - E.B. White
“A car is useless in New York, essential everywhere else. The same with good manners. - Mignon McLaughlin
“In New York you’ve got to have all the luck. - Charles Bukowski
“The city is an amusement park: Everything is concrete, it’s full of tourists, and food vendors line the sidewalks. It’s like living in a casino: The lights never dim, there’s an incessant din of bells and horns, and there’s always someone, somewhere, crying in a bathroom. - Jane Borden
“In New York the sky is bluer, and the grass is greener, and the girls are prettier, and the steaks are thicker, and the buildings are higher, and the streets are wider, and the air is finer, than the sky, or the grass, or the girls, or the steaks, or the air of any place else in the world. - Edna Ferber
“I love New York, even though it isn’t mine, the way something has to be, a tree or a street or a house, something, anyway, that belongs to me because I belong to it. - Truman Capote
“The faces in New York remind me of people who played a game and lost. - Murray Kempton
“He adored New York City. He idolized it all out of proportion… no, make that: he – he romanticized it all out of proportion. Yes. To him, no matter what the season was, this was still a town that existed in black and white and pulsated to the great tunes of George Gershwin. - Woody Allen
“One can’t paint New York as it is, but rather as it is felt. - Georgia O’Keefe
“In New York City, one suicide in ten is attributed to a lack of storage space. - Judith Stone
“There is no place like it, no place with an atom of its glory, pride, and exultancy. It lays its hand upon a man’s bowels; he grows drunk with ecstasy; he grows young and full of glory, he feels that he can never die. - Walt Whitman
“So I went to New York City to be born again. It was and remains easy for most Americans to go somewhere else and start anew. I wasn’t like my parents. I didn’t have any supposedly sacred piece of land or shoals of friends to leave behind. Nowhere has the number zero been of more philosophical value than in the United States…. and when the [train] plunged into a tunnel under New York City, with its lining of pipes and wires, I was out of the womb and into the birth canal. - Kurt Vonnegut
“New York is strange in the summer. Life goes on as usual but it’s not, it’s like everyone is just pretending, as if everyone has been cast as the star in a movie about their life, so they’re one step removed from it. And then in September it all gets normal again. - Peter Cameron
“It is necessary to find one’s own way in New York. New York City is not hospitable. She is very big and she has no heart. She is not charming. She is not sympathetic. She is rushed and noisy and unkempt, a hard, ambitious, irresolute place, not very lively, and never gay. When she glitters she is very, very bright, and when she does not glitter she is dirty. New York does nothing for those of us who are inclined to love her except implant in our hearts a homesickness that baffles us until we go away from her, and then we realize why we are restless. At home or away, we are homesick for New York not because New York used to be better and not because she used to be worse but because the city holds us and we don’t know why. - Maeve Brennan
“New York, you got money on your mind. And my words won’t make a dime’s worth a difference, so here’s to you New York. - Art Garfunkel
“Cut off as I am, it is inevitable that I should sometimes feel like a shadow walking in a shadowy world. When this happens I ask to be taken to New York City. Always I return home weary but I have the comforting certainty that mankind is real flesh and I myself am not a dream. - Hellen Keller
“I moved to New York City for my health. I’m paranoid and it was the only place where my fears were justified. - Anita Weiss
“There is no question that there is an unseen world. The problem is, how far is it from midtown and how late is it open? - Woody Allen
“When you leave New York you ain’t going anywhere. - Jimmy Breslin
