There is something in the New York air that makes sleep useless.
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.
I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York's skyline.
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?
The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.
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.
A hundred times have I thought New York is a catastrophe and 50 times: It is a beautiful catastrophe.
When you leave New York, you are astonished at how clean the rest of the world is. Clean is not enough.
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.
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.
Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will.
Everybody ought to have a lower East Side in their life.
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.
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.
I go to Paris, I go to London, I go to Rome, and I always say, 'There's no place like New York. It's the most exciting city in the world now. That's the way it is. That's it.'
New York is the only real city-city.
New York now leads the world's great cities in the number of people around whom you shouldn't make a sudden move.
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.
New York has a trip-hammer vitality which drives you insane with restlessness if you have no inner stabilizer.
I didn't know the city at all, but I was so happy to be in New York I cried. I was so excited.
or simply:
