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"Each man reads his own meaning into New York" - Meyer Berger
Here you'll find writers, historians, architects, playwrights, critics and celebrities who, traveling through the streets of New York, once paused to paint their own New York in its bright colors - and dark shadows. New York can be, in the words of Alistair Cooke - "the biggest collection of villages in the world" - or as Ralph Waldo Emerson once described it, "...a sucked orange." Decide on your own favorites from our collection of quotes about New York, New York ...
• I think
you know that when an American stays away from New York too long
something happens to him. Perhaps he becomes a little provincial,
a little dead and afraid. Sherwood Anderson • I think New York is not the cultural center of America, but the business and administrative center of American culture. Saul Bellow • Each man reads his own meaning into New York. Meyer Berger • Everybody ought to have a lower East Side in their life. Irving Berlin • A great many people go after success simply for the shiny prizes it brings…And nowhere is it pursued more ardently than in the city of New York. Stephen Birmingham East Side, West
Side, all around the town, • If you
live in New York, even if you're Catholic, you're Jewish. Lennie
Bruce • 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 • The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum… is a war between architecture and painting in which both come out badly maimed. John Canaday • New York is the only real city-city. Truman Capote • When I had a look at the lights of Broadway by night, I said to my American friends : "What a glorious garden of wonders this would be, to any who was lucky enough to be unable to read." G. K. Chesterton • That sinister Stonehenge of economic man, Rockefeller Center. Cyril Connolly • New York is the biggest collection of villages in the world. Alistair Cooke • 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 • A bulger of a place it is. The number of the ships beat me all hollow, and looked for all the world like a big clearing in the West, with the dead trees all standing. Davy Crockett (1835) • She has become a wicked and wild bitch in her old age has Manhattan, but there is still no sensation in the world quite like walking her sidewalks. Great surges of energy sweep all around you; the air fizzes like champagne, while always there is a nervous edge of fear and whispered distant promises of sudden violence. Tom Davies (1979) • There is something in the New York air that makes sleep useless. Simone De Beauvoir
• 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 • 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 a sucked orange. Ralph Waldo Emerson • 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 • 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 • I carry the place around the world the world in my heart but sometimes I try to shake it off in my dreams. F. Scott Fitzgerald • New York is large, glamorous, easy-going, kindly and incurious, but above all it is a crucible - because it is large enough to be incurious. Ford Madox Ford • 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 remains what it has always been : a city of ebb and flow, a city of constant shifts of population and economics, a city of virtually no rest. It is harsh, dirty, and dangerous, it is whimsical and fanciful, it is beautiful and soaring - it is not one or another of these things but all of them, all at once, and to fail to accept this paradox is to deny the reality of city existence. Paul Goldberger • I remember how often some of us walked out of the darkness of the Lower East Side and into the brilliant sunlight of Washington Square. Harry Golden • New York is hard, cynical, ruthless, even beyond other cities. From their early repression its children emerge sophisticated, both stunted and overdeveloped, perverted, premature, forced by the artificiality of their environment. Ernest Gruening • 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 • 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) • The lusts of the flesh can be gratified anywhere; it is not this sort of license that distinguishes New York. It is rather, a lust of the total ego for recognition, even for eminence. More than elsewhere, everybody here wants to be somebody. Sydney J. Harris • It's a town you come to for a short time. Ernest Hemingway • It's a fickle town, a tough town. They getcha, boy. They don't let you escape with minor scratches and bruises. They put scars on you here. Reggie Jackson • New York is appalling, fantastically charmless and elaborately dire. Henry James • It is
altogether an extraordinary growing, swarming, glittering, pushing,
chattering, good-natured, cosmopolitan place, and perhaps in some
ways the best imitation of Paris that can be found (with a great
originality of its own). Henry James • New York,
like London, seems to be a cloacina [toilet] of all the depravities
of human nature. Thomas Jefferson • Brooklyn
Heights itself is a window on the port. Here, where the perspective
is fixed by the towers of Manhattan and the hills of New Jersey
and Staten Island, the channels running between seem fingers of
the world ocean. Here one can easily embrace the suggestion, which
Whitman felt so easily, that the whole American world opens out
from here, north and west. Alfred Kazin • The faces
in New York remind me of people who played a game and lost. Murray
Kempton
• Whenever
spring comes to New York I can't stand the suggestion of the land
that come blowing over the river from New Jersey and I've got to
go. So I went. Jack Kerouac • No one
as yet has approached the management of New York in a proper spirit;
that is to say, regarding it as the shiftless outcome of squalid
barbarism and reckless extravagance. No one is likely to do so,
because reflections on the long narrow pig-trough are construed
as malevolent attacks against the spirit and majesty of the American
people, and lead to angry comparisons. Rudyard Kipling • To start
with, there's the alien accent. "Tree" is the number between
two and four. "Jeintz" is the name of the New York professional
football team. A "fit" is a bottle measuring seven ounces
less than a quart. This exotic tongue has no relationship to any
of the approved languages at the United Nations, and is only slightly
less difficult to master than Urdu. Fletcher Knebel • As a
city, New York moves in the forefront of today's great trend of
great cities toward neurosis. She is confused, self-pitying, helpless
and dependent. John Larnder • A hundred times have I thought New York is a catastrophe, and fifty times : It is a beautiful catastrophe. Le Corbusier • Vehement
silhouettes of Manhattan - that vertical city with unimaginable
diamonds. • Robinson
Crusoe, the self-sufficient man, could not have lived in New York
city. Walter Lippman • Part
of the oncoming demise (of New York during its terrible fiscal crisis)
is that none of us can simply believe it. We were always the best
and the strongest of cities, and our people were vital to the teeth.
Knock them down eight times and they would get up with that look
in the eye which suggests the fight has barely begun. Norman
Mailer • It seems
to me that you are better off, as a writer and as an American, in
a small town than you'd be in New York. I thoroughly detest New
York, though I have to go there very often…. Have you ever
noticed that no American writer of any consequence lives in Manhattan?
Dreiser tried it (after many years in the Bronx), but finally moved
to California. H.L. Mencken • When
it's three o' clock in New York, it's still 1938 in London. Bette
Midler • My one
thought is to get out of New York, to experience something genuinely
American. • New York
has a trip-hammer vitality which drives you insane with restlessness
if you have no inner stabilizer. Henry Miller • In Rome
I am weighted down by a lack of momentum, the inertia of a spent
civilization. In New York I feel plugged into a strong alternating
current of hope and despair. Ted Morgan New York is
Babylon : Brooklyn is the truly Holy City. • And it
was to this city, whenever I went home, that I always knew I must
return, for it was mistress of one's wildest hopes, protector of
one's deepest privacies. It was half insane with its noise, violence,
and decay, but it gave one the tender security of fulfillment. On
winter afternoons, from my office, there were sunsets across Manhattan
when the smog itself shimmered and glowed… Despite its difficulties,
which become more obvious all the time, one was constantly put to
the test by this city, which finally came down to its people; no
other place in America had quite such people and they would not
allow you to go stale; in the end they were its triumph and its
reward. • Unfortunately
there are still people in other areas who regard New York City not
as part of the United States, but as a sort of excrescence fastened
to our Eastern shore and peopled by the less venturesome waves of
foreigners who failed to go West to the genuine American frontier. • The skyscrapers
began to rise again, frailly massive, elegantly utilitarian, images
in their grace, audacity and inconclusiveness, of the whole character
of the people who produces them. • He who touches the soil of Manhattan and the pavement of New York, touches, whenever he knows or not, Walt Whitman. Lewis Mumford Vulgar of manner,
overfed, • New York
City is made up of five boroughs, four of which - Brooklyn, Queens,
Richmond, the Bronx - compose crinkled lily pads about the basking
trout of Manhattan. • Any city
gets what it admires, will pay for, and, ultimately deserves. Even
when we had Penn station, we couldn't afford to keep it clean. We
want and deserve tin-can architecture and a tin-horn culture. And
we will probably be judged not by the monuments we build out but
by those we have destroyed. New York Times editorial
(1963) • It'll
be a great place if they ever finish it. O. Henry • In dress,
habits, manners, provincialism, routine and narrowness, he acquired
that charming insolence, that irritating completeness, that sophisticated
crassness, that overbalanced poise that makes the Manhattan gentleman
so delightfully small in its greatness. O. Henry • I have
been roaming far and wide over this island of Manhatta… the
city is thronged with strangers, and everything wears an aspect
of intense life. Business has experienced a thorough revival, and
"all goes merry as a marriage bell." Notwithstanding the
Croton water, or "the Crot'n", as the Gothamites have
it, the streets are, with rare exception, insufferably dirty. The
exceptions are to be found in Bond Street, Waverly Place, and some
others of the upper, more retired, and more fashionable quarters…
Edgar Allan Poe
• A crowd pagan as ever imperial Rome was, eager, careless with an animal vigor unlike that of any European crowd that I ever looked at. Ezra Pound • There are certainly numberless women of fashion who consider it perfectly natural to go miles down Fifth Avenue, or Madison Avenue, yet for whom a voyage of half a dozen blocks to east or west would be an adventure, almost a dangerous impairment of good breeding. Jules Romains • When its 100 degrees in New York, it's 72 in Los Angeles. When its 30 degrees in New York, in Los Angeles it's still 72. However, there are 6 million interesting people in New York, and only 72 in Los Angeles. Neil Simon • It isn't
like the rest of the country - it is like a nation itself - more
tolerant than the rest in a curious way. Littleness gets swallowed
up here. All the viciousness that makes other cities vicious is
sucked up and absorbed in New York. John Steinbeck • Situated
on an island which I think it will one day cover, it rises like
Venice from the sea, and like that fairest of cities in the days
of her glory, receives into its lap tribute of all the riches of
the earth. Francis Trollope (1827) • Hemingway describes literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other. John Updike • I think
my favorite sport in the Olympics is the one in which you make your
way through the snow, you stop, you shoot a gun, and then you continue
on. In most of the world, it is known as the biathlon, except in
New York City, where it is known as winter. Michael Ventre,
L.A. Daily News • Skyscraper
national park. Kurt Vonnegut • An idea,
a song, a discovery, an invention, may be born anywhere. But if
it is to be communicated, if it is to be tested and compared and
appreciated, then someone has always to carry it to the city. Max
Ways • And suddenly
as I looked back at the skyscrapers of lower New York a queer fancy
sprang into my head. They reminded me quite irresistibly of plied-up
packing-cases outside a warehouse. I was amazed I had not seen the
resemblance before. I could really have believed for a moment that
that was what they were, and that presently out of these would come
the real thing, palaces and noble places, free, high circumstances,
and space and leisure, light and fine living for the sons of men.
H.G. Wells • New York City is a great apartment hotel in which everyone lives and no one is at home. Glenway Wescott • New York
is to the nation what the white church spire is to the village -
the visible symbol of aspiration and faith, the white plume saying
the way is up! E.B. White • More
and more too, the old name absorbs into me Mannahatta, 'the place
encircled by many swift tides and sparkling waters.' How fit a name
for America's great democratic island city! The word itself, how
beautiful! how aboriginal! how it seems to rise with tall spires,
glistening in sunshine, with such New World atmosphere, vista and
action! Walt Whitman • 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 • At night… the streets become rhythmical perspectives of glowing dotted lines, reflections hung upon them in the streets as the wistaria hangs its violet racemes on its trellis. The buildings are shimmering verticality, a gossamer veil, a festive scene-prop hanging there against the black sky to dazzle, entertain, amaze. Frank Lloyd Wright
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From
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of soundbites, classic quotes and witticisms.
"It
isn't like the rest of the country - it is like a nation
itself - more tolerant than the rest in a curious way..."|
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