Greenwich Quotes

#1. On 11 September, I was living in Greenwich Village, New York; my children learned to tell south from north by looking at the World Trade Center.

Yochai Benkler

#2. The walls loom, grey as the rain outside. LIke the sky of England itself. Everything seems colourless and humbled, despite the layers of velvets and tapestries, the peacock plumage of courtiers and ladies. Greenwich Palace feels like my father's disappointment made tangible.

Katherine Longshore

#3. You know, Greenwich Village was the traditional bohemia of New York. I wish I could say that was entirely true now. It's, uh ... changed. It's now got, God help us, investment bankers and journalists, but it's still a very beautiful part of New York.

Jay McInerney

#4. This is unexposed film of Greenwich Village because nothing ever happens there.

Weegee

#5. Franz Kline, who became known for his black and white paintings, did a whole series of gorgeous landscapes and wonderful portraits that may still hang in Greenwich Village.

David Amram

#6. Dave Van Ronk, for those who don't know him - probably most don't know - was a folk singer. He's kind of the biggest person on the scene in 1961 in the folk revival in Greenwich Village, biggest person on the scene until Bob Dylan showed up.

Ethan Coen

#7. Greenwich Village always had its share of mind readers, but there are many more these days, and they seem to have moved closer to the mainstream of life in the city. What was crazy 10 years ago is now respectable, even among the best-educated New Yorkers.

Aravind Adiga

#8. My business partner Robert De Niro knows a lot about hotels; he opened the Greenwich Hotel in New York City.

Nobu Matsuhisa

#9. I was going to public school in the post-World War II, the grey doldrum years. But I was in this extraordinary environment of Manhattan, of Greenwich Village, of bohemian parents.

Anne Waldman

#10. Greenwich is a funny word, isn't it? All green and witchy. Like soup.

Marissa Meyer

#11. So I played the acoustic guitar and harmonica and stomped my foot and I think I was right in assuming that Greenwich Village would be the best place to perform my own material and possibly get some attention, move on to making records and all.

Steve Forbert

#12. Our family life, before figure skating turned it upside down, seemed normal. Our town of Riverside, Connecticut, was part of Greenwich, and we had the advantage of their wonderful community, with great beaches and beautiful parks.

Dorothy Hamill

#13. I never felt at home. I stuck outIn New York City, especially in Greenwich Village, down among the cranks and the misfits and the one-lungers and the has-beens and the might've beens and the would-bes and the never-wills and the God-knows-whats, I have always felt at home.

Joseph Mitchell

#14. What are you going to do?
"Can't say - run for president, write -"
"Greenwich Village?"
"Good heavens, no - I said write - not drink.

F Scott Fitzgerald

#15. Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village. downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I've been up all night, talking, talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles blues shout blind on the phonograph

Allen Ginsberg

#16. She [Beatrice] alone was still real for him, still implied meaning in the world, and beauty. Her nature became his landmark - what Melville would call, with more sobriety than we can now muster, his Greenwich Standard ...

Dan Simmons

#17. Greenwich got the nod because 72 per cent of the world's commerce depended on British sea-charts - and because it annoyed the French intensely.

Richard Happer

#18. Regularly, customers asked for a book on Greenwich, and there was none. After all, Elizabeth I was born there. The Observatory is known all over the world; the Royal Naval College is there. So I decided to do it.

Nigel Hamilton

#19. I always got a kick out of it when they called it the California Sound because it really came out of Liverpool and Greenwich Village.

Roger McGuinn

#20. Toward the end of February 1954, James Beard was at work in his Greenwich Village kitchen doing what he most loved to do: cooking delicious meals.

Laura Shapiro

#21. My look was even more solidified when I started singing in Greenwich Village with my sister Lucy. We wore matching dresses as the Simon Sisters.

Carly Simon

#22. Celebrated in the Bob Dylan ballad 'Joey,' Crazy Joe Gallo was a charismatic beatnik gangster whose forays into Greenwich Village in the 1960s inspired his bloody revolution against the Mafia.

Tom Folsom

#23. I did not have a mobile phone in 1993. No one did, except the occasional banker or Hollywood star seeming smart, or the main character in 'American Psycho.' In 1993, every day was 'let's get lost.' I could walk Greenwich Village for hours and not be found.

Elizabeth Wurtzel

#24. People talk a lot about all the homosexuals there are to see in Greenwich Village, but it was all the neuters that caught my eye that day. These were my people
as used as I was to wanting love from nowhere, as certain as I was that almost anything desirable was likely to be booby-trapped.

Kurt Vonnegut

#25. But in my imagination this whole thing developed and I started mixing up old folk songs with the Beatles beat and taking them down to Greenwich Village and playing them for the people there.

Roger McGuinn

#26. These people, as far as I can see, do not congregate in the notorious centers of the movement, like the North Beach in San Francisco or Greenwich Village, or Venice, California.

Alan Watts

#27. In such places as Greenwich Village, a menage-a-trois was completed- the bohemian and the juvenile delinquent came face-to-face with the Negro, and the hipster was a fact in American life.

Norman Mailer

#28. My father took me back home, back to Greenwich Village, and he thought by taking me out of the orphanage he'd be out of the World War too. But no way - they got him anyway. He went in the Navy and then I lived on the streets.

Gregory Corso

#29. Greenwich Village ... the village of low rents and high arts.

O. Henry

#30. My art teacher in junior high was a very out gay man and a mentor to me. He would tell us about Greenwich Village and show us the 'Village Voice' and describe his life, but it was all sort of subversive and below the radar.

Gus Van Sant

#31. When Daddy didn't answer, I knew that something was wrong. Mariah thought back to that seemingly endless drive from Greenwich Village as she had rushed to New Jersey that night.

Mary Higgins Clark

#32. This Bouillabaisse a noble dish is - A sort of soup or broth, or brew, Or hotchpotch of all sorts of fishes, That Greenwich never could outdo; Green herbs, red peppers, mussels, saffron, Soles, onions, garlic, roach, and dace; All these you eat at Terre's tavern, In that one dish of Bouillabaisse.

William Makepeace Thackeray

#33. If the parks be "the lungs of London" we wonder what Greenwich Fair is
a periodical breaking out, we suppose
a sort of spring rash.

Charles Dickens

#34. I grew up in Greenwich Village. Dad was friends with John Lennon and Yoko Ono.

Yancy Butler

#35. Now, twenty years old, I come out and I go back to Greenwich Village. Now, of course, I'm a wealthy man.

Gregory Corso

#36. I grew up in New York City in Greenwich Village and had parents who were somewhat bohemian so I was always on the nonconformist side of the equation.

Anne Waldman

#37. I got into a brawl one night in a saloon in Greenwich Village. Elia Kazan, a great director, saw me put out a couple of hecklers and figures there was some Big Daddy in me, just lyin' dormant. And out it came. People still do call me Big Daddy, but to me, inside, I'm no Big Daddy at all.

Burl Ives

#38. Esther liked books out where everyone could see them, a sort of graphic index to the intricate labyrinth of her mind arrayed to impress the most casual guest, a system of immediate introduction which she had found to obtain in a number of grimy intellectual households in Greenwich Village.

William Gaddis

#39. That is where a big part of the Old South is, on coffee tables in Greenwich Village.

Rick Bragg

#40. At Naval Air Station Grosse Ile in Michigan, he and Barbara took a room in town for fourteen dollars a week, but without kitchen privileges. "It is sort of a lonely existence for poor Bar," Bush wrote home to Greenwich, "but she doesn't complain at all, and I am just in heaven having her here.

Jon Meacham

#41. We moved around a bit when I was younger, but I grew up primarily in Rhode Island, in a beautiful seaside community called East Greenwich. It was a small town, and so safe that we rarely locked our doors at night.

Michelle Gagnon

#42. When I was 18, I lived in Greenwich Village, New York, for nine months. At that time, I wanted to change the world, not through architecture, but through painting. I lived the artist's life, mingling with poets and writers, and working as a waiter. I was intrigued by the aliveness of the city.

Christian De Portzamparc

#43. We had been reading about these beatniks who hung out or lived in Greenwich Village, and we wanted to find out what a 'beatnik' was, and so a friend and I went right to the source. What we learned, of course, was that beatniks were mostly artists.

Richie Havens

#44. After university, I taught secondary school for a while and opened a bookshop in Greenwich, just east of London.

Nigel Hamilton

#45. I love walking around and grabbing coffee and sitting in a park and people watching ... I love Greenwich Village.

Joe Manganiello

#46. My background did not start with the East Side; it started with Greenwich Village, which is West Side.

Gregory Corso

#47. My father was a golden boy from a very small town. He won a very prestigious law scholarship to NYU Law School, and there in Greenwich Village, he met my mother, who was very young, fresh off the boat from Germany.

Blake Bailey

#48. 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

#49. Life is a campus: in a Greenwich Village bookstore, looking for a New Yorker collection, I asked of an earnest-looking assistant where I might find the humour section. Peering over her granny glasses, she enquired, Humour studies would that be, sir?

Keith Waterhouse

#50. His motivation was to rattle the good people of Greenwich mean time, have them raise their heads from their tea and scones, and say, Oh, yes. Africa. For a fleeting moment they'd have the same awareness of us that we had of them.

Abraham Verghese