True New Yorkers do not really seek information about the outside world. They feel that if anything is not in New York, it is not likely to be interesting. – Jimmy Breslin

New York had all the iridescence of the beginning of the world.- F. Scott Fitzgerald

Just returned from my annual trek to NYC where I trade three days of wide-eyed wonder in exchange for one day in a board meeting eleven stories above Madison Square Garden.

Manhattan and Paris. No where else in the world am I willing to walk for miles and miles in the wrong shoes.

A great skyscraper is currently under construction right in Times Square. Do they get to do that? What is it about New York City that makes me feel my permission should have been asked first?

New York is the only city in the world where you can get run down on the sidewalk by a pedestrian. – Russell Baker

“I mean it,” I said. “You’re in danger.”

“Relax, Harry. I’m not letting anyone lick me, and I’m not looking anyone in the eyes. It’s kind of like visiting New York.”

– Jim Butcher, Grave Peril

My advice for aspiring writers is go to New York. And if you can’t go to New York, go to the place that represents New York to you, where the standards for writing are high, there are other people who share your dreams, and where you can talk, talk, talk about your interests. Writing books begins in talking about it, like most human projects, and in being close to those who have already done what you propose to do.- Walter Kirn

I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out out of the West and reached the mirage. I could taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume and I knew that it would cost something sooner or later—because I did not belong there, did not come from there—but when you are twenty-two or twenty-three, you figure that later you will have a high emotional balance, and be able to pay whatever it costs. I still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month.
– Joan Didion

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. – John Lennon