New York City Quotes

• Everybody ought to have a lower East Side in their life.

  Irving Berlin

  Music, New York, East Berlin

  "Vogue" Magazine, November 1, 1962.

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• 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

  Beautiful, New York, Stars

  18 Copy quote

• There is something in the New York air that makes sleep useless.

  Simone de Beauvoir

  Travel, New York, Sleep

  Simone de Beauvoir (2000). “America Day by Day”, p.18, Univ of California Press

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• I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York's skyline.

  Ayn Rand

  New York, Sunset, Sight

  Ayn Rand (2005). “The Fountainhead”, p.423, Penguin

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• Sometimes, from beyond the skycrapers, the cry of a tugboat finds you in your insomnia, and you remember that this desert of iron and cement is an island.

  Albert Camus

  New York, Insomnia, Islands

  Albert Camus (1987). “American journals”

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• I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York's skyline. Particularly when one can't see the details. Just the shapes. The shapes and the thought that made them. The sky over New York and the will of man made visible. What other religion do we need?

  Ayn Rand

  New York, Sunset, Men

  Ayn Rand (2005). “The Fountainhead”, p.423, Penguin

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• 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 the beauty in the world.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  New York, Bridges, Cities

  F. Scott Fitzgerald (2015). “The Echoes of the Jazz Age Collection: The Beautiful and Damned, Winter Dreams, The Great Gatsby, Babylon Revisited, The Diamond as Big as the Ritz and many more”, p.517, e-artnow

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• Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will.

  Ezra Pound

  Stars, Squares, Satisfaction

  Ezra Pound (1992). “A Walking Tour in Southern France: Ezra Pound Among the Troubadours”, p.112, New Directions Publishing

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• I look out the window and I see the lights and the skyline and the people on the street rushing around looking for action, love, and the world's greatest chocolate chip cookie, and my heart does a little dance.

  Nora Ephron

  New York, Heart, Light

  FaceBook post by Nora Ephron from Dec 22, 2014

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• The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.

  John Updike

  New York, Believe, People

  FaceBook post by John Updike from Dec 31, 2013

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• 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

  New York, House, Tree

  Truman Capote (2012). “Breakfast at Tiffany's”, p.84, Vintage

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• When you leave New York, you are astonished at how clean the rest of the world is. Clean is not enough.

  Fran Lebowitz

  Funny, Travel, New York

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• A hundred times have I thought New York is a catastrophe and 50 times: It is a beautiful catastrophe.

  Le Corbusier

  Beautiful, New York, Design

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• I'm going to show you the real New York - witty, smart, and international - like any metropolis. Tell me this: where in Europe can you find old Hungary, old Russia, old France, old Italy? In Europe you're trying to copy America, you're almost American. But here you'll find Europeans who immigrated a hundred years ago - and we haven't spoiled them. Oh, Gio! You must see why I love New York. Because the whole world's in New York.

  Oriana Fallaci

  Witty, New York, Real

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• London is satisfied, Paris is resigned, but New York is always hopeful.

  Dorothy Parker

  New York, Paris, Hopeful

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• New York has a trip-hammer vitality which drives you insane with restlessness if you have no inner stabilizer.

  Henry Miller

  New York, Insane, Vitality

  Henry Miller (2010). “The Colossus of Maroussi (Second Edition)”, p.159, New Directions Publishing

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• 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

  New York, Thinking, People

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• Over the great bridge, with the sunlight through the girders making a constant flicker upon the moving cars, with the city rising up across the river in white heaps and sugar lumps all built with a wish out of non-olfactory money. 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 the beauty in the world.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  New York, Moving, Bridges

  F. Scott Fitzgerald (2002). “F. Scott Fitzgerald: Trimalchio: An Early Version of 'The Great Gatsby'”, p.57, Cambridge University Press

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• 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

  New York, Pride, Men

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• New York is the biggest collection of villages in the world.

  Alistair Cooke

  New York, Cities In The World, Village

  Alistair Cooke (1951). “One man's America”, New York, Knopf

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• New York now leads the world's great cities in the number of people around whom you shouldn't make a sudden move.

  David Letterman

  New York, Moving, Cities

  "Late Show with David Letterman", February 9, 1984.

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• 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

  New York, Mean, Cities

  FaceBook post by Joan Didion from Dec 22, 2014

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• New York is the only real city-city.

  Truman Capote

  New York, Real, Cities

  Truman Capote, M. Thomas Inge (1987). “Truman Capote: Conversations”, p.26, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• Anytime four New Yorkers get into a cab together without arguing, a bank robbery has just taken place.

  Johnny Carson

  New York, Humorous, Taken

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• I didn't know the city at all, but I was so happy to be in New York I cried. I was so excited.

  Greta Gerwig

  New York, Cities, Nyc

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