It’s no secret that New York is a wellspring of inspiration, with action, romance, and fascinating strangers lurking around every corner. No wonder so many artists, writers, and creatives have flocked here. While there are some disputes on what, exactly, makes a real New Yorker, everyone can agree that that the moment you step onto our fair city’s streets, something is stirred within you. These 30 Best quotes about New York City truly capture that feeling.
[su_quote cite=” F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby”]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.[/su_quote]
[su_quote cite=”Truman Capote“]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.[/su_quote]
[su_quote cite=”John Updike”]The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.[/su_quote]
[su_quote cite=”Nora Ephron, Heartburn”]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.[/su_quote]
[su_quote cite=“Tom Wolfe“]One belongs to New York instantly, one belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years.[/su_quote]
[su_quote cite=”Lindsey Kelk, I Heart New York”]People go to LA to “find themselves”, they come to New York to become someone new.[/su_quote]
[su_quote cite=”Woody Allen”]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?[/su_quote]
[su_quote cite=”Fran Lebowitz”]When you leave New York, you are astonished at how clean the rest of the world is. Clean is not enough.[/su_quote]
[su_quote cite=”Groucho Marx”]Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book -and does[/su_quote]
[su_quote cite=”Mickey Spillane, Kiss Her Goodbye: An Otto Penzler Book”]Guys like you can’t escape the city. Hell, you a got a blood contract with this place. You’re married to the old girl.[/su_quote]
[su_quote cite=”F. Scott Fitzgerald”]I carry the place around the world in my heart but sometimes I try to shake it off in my dreams.[/su_quote]
[su_quote cite=”Jimmy Breslin”]When you leave New York you ain’t going anywhere.[/su_quote]
[su_quote cite=”John Lennon”]I regret profoundly that I was not an American and not born in Greenwich Village. It might be dying, and there might be a lot of dirt in the air you breathe, but this is where it’s happening.[/su_quote]
[su_quote cite=”Arthur Phillips, The Song Is You”]He fell in love with Manhattan’s skyline, like a first-time brothel guest falling for a seasoned professional. He mused over her reflections in the black East River at dusk, dawn, or darkest night, and each haloed light-in a tower or strung along the jeweled and sprawling spider legs of the Brooklyn Bridge’s spans-hinted at some meaning, which could be understood only when made audible by music and encoded in lyrics.[/su_quote]
[su_quote cite=”Harry Hershfield”]It’s a city where everbody mutinies but no one deserts.[/su_quote]
[su_quote cite=”Robert Benchley”]Central Park is the grandiose symbol of the front yard each child in New York hasn’t got.[/su_quote]
[su_quote cite=”E.B.White“]The city is like poetry; it compresses all life, all races and breeds, into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines.[/su_quote]
[su_quote cite=”Alexander Woollcott”]You haven’t lived until you died in New York.[/su_quote]
[su_quote cite=”Arthur C. Clarke”]If man can live in Manhattan, he can live anywhere.[/su_quote]
[su_quote cite=”Ann Douglas”]Probably everything in my life comes back to a feeling of abandonment, and this city never abandons you.[/su_quote]
[su_quote cite=”Moss Hart, Act One“]The only credential the city asked was the boldness to dream. For those who did, it unlocked its gates and its treasures, not caring who they were or where they came from.[/su_quote]
[su_quote cite=”E.B.White“]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.[/su_quote]
[su_quote cite=”Rebecca McNutt, Bittersweet Symphony”]When she thought of New York City now, the place where she’d lived for most of her life, the only home she’d ever really known, she realized the city was like a person who now oftentimes struggled to stand proud because both its legs had collapsed in a sea of dust, fire and scattered office papers.[/su_quote]
[su_quote cite=”Ralph Ellison”]New York!” he said. “That’s not a place, it’s a dream.[/su_quote]
[su_quote cite=”Jodi Lynn Anderson, Midnight at the Electric”]So many lights you’d think we were living in a constellation.[/su_quote]
[su_quote cite=”Joan Didion”]I would stay in New York, I told him, just six months, and I could see the Brooklyn Bridge from my window. As it turned out the bridge was the Triborough, and I stayed eight years.[/su_quote]
[su_quote cite=”Miles Watson”]New York, I thought, was a city defined by its flaws. In every possible way, its virtues were overwhelmed by its vices, as Jekyll was by Hyde. Yet it was these very vices that gave the city its character – like tar in an oak barrel lending its flavor to Scotch.[/su_quote]
[su_quote cite=”Jonathan Franzen, How to Be Alone“]Only in a crowded, diverse place like New York, surrounded by strangeness, do I come home to myself.[/su_quote]
[su_quote cite=”Elizabeth Enright, The Saturdays”]All over the city lights were coming on in the purple-blue dusk. The streetlights looked delicate and frail, as though they might suddenly float away from their lampposts like balloons. Long twirling ribbons of light, red, green, violet, were festooned about the doorways of drugstores and restaurants–and the famous electric signs of Broadway had come to life with glittering fish, dancing figures, and leaping fountains, all flashing like fire. Everything was beautiful. Up in the deepening sky above the city, the first stars appeared white and rare as diamonds.[/su_quote]
[su_quote cite=”E.B.White, Here Is New York”]It can destroy an individual, or it can fulfill him, depending a good deal on luck. No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky.[/su_quote]
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