One belongs to New York instantly, one belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years Thomas Wolfe
The present in New York is so powerful that the past is lost. John Jay Chapman
The thing that impressed me then as now about New York . . . was the sharp, and at the same time immense, contrast it showed between the dull and the shrewd, the strong and the weak, the rich and the poor, the wise and the ignorant . . . the strong, or those who ultimately dominated, were so very strong, and the weak so very, very weak-- and so very, very many. Theodore Dreiser
You come to New York to find the ambiance that will evoke your best. You do not necessarily know precisely what that might be, but you come to New York to discover it. James Hillman
New York is the biggest collection of villages in the world. Alistair Cooke
New York is an arrogant city; it has always wanted to be all things to all people, and a surprising amount of the time it has succeeded. It has always been a city of commerce, and the values of commerce have tended to supercede other values. There is no pretense here of excessive gentility, and the rush was always to the new, the large, the prosperous, the fashionable. Paul Goldberger
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 and I myself am not a dream. Helen Keller
When it's three o'clock in New York, it's still 1938 in London. Bette Midler
New York is a different country. Maybe it ought to have a separate government. Everybody thinks differently, acts differently --they just don't know what the hell the rest of the United States is. Henry Ford
Everybody ought to have a lower East Side in their life. Irving Berlin
Over the great bridge, with 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 for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world. F. Scott Fitzgerald
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
First New York was a sort of provincial capital, bigger and richer than Manchester or Marseilles, but not much different in its essential spirit. Then, after the war, it became one among half a dozen world cities. Today it has the appearance of standing alone, as the center of culture in the part of the world that still tries to be civilized. Malcolm Cowley
There is something in the New York air that makes sleep useless. Simone De Beauvoir
New York is at once cosmopolitan and parochial, a compendium of sentimental certainties. It is in fact the most sentimental of the world's great cities - in its self-congratulation a kind of San Francisco of the East. John Gregory Dunne
New York is the only real city-city. Truman Capote
New York is notoriously the largest and least-loved of any of our great cities. Why should it be loved as a city? It is never the same city for a dozen years altogether. A man born in New York forty years ago finds nothing, absolutely nothing, of the New York he knew. If he chances to stumble upon a few old houses not yet leveled, he is fortunate. But the landmarks, the objects which marked the city to him, as a city, are gone. Harper's (1856)
New York city, the incomparable, the brilliant star city of cities, the forty-ninth state, a law unto itself, the Cyclopean Paradox, the inferno with no-out-of bounds, the supreme expression of both the miseries and the splendors of contemporary civilization, the Macedonia of the United States. It meets the most severe test that may be applied to definition of a metropolis - it stays up all night. But also it becomes a small town when it rains. John Gunther