Quotes About Manhattan

#1. This fair but pitiless city of Manhattan was without a soul ... its inhabitants were manikins moved by wires and springs.

O. Henry

#2. When I'm working on a film, I think about how it will play with a tiny audience of friends whose opinions I respect - basically, a 40-bloc radius from my apartment in Manhattan.

Doug Liman

#3. I do think we need more cameras. We have to stay ahead of the terrorists, and I do know in New York, the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative, which is based on cameras, the outstanding work that results from that.

Peter T. King

#4. No one drives in Manhattan - in fact, many of the folks who live in Manhattan don't even have driving licenses!

Moby

#5. Movement was the essence of Manhattan. It had always been so, and now its sense of flow, energy, openness, elasticity as Charles Dickens had called it, was headier than ever. Half the city's skill and aspirations seemed to go into the propagation of motion.

Jan Morris

#6. I don't know if I miss it per se, but I do miss the fact that there just doesn't seem to be any rock 'n' roll out there anyplace. Everything does seem kind of tame. It's even hard in Manhattan to go out and find a good band to go see.

Joan Jett

#7. Robert M. Morgenthau, the Manhattan district attorney, has seen a few financial schemes in his time. As the lead local prosecutor in the world's financial capital, he has battled frauds like the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, which stole billions of dollars from investors worldwide.

Alex Berenson

#8. I choose to be American, I choose to live in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, I choose to have Puerto Rican/Jewish neighbors, and I choose to maintain my Chinese identity.

Eddie Huang

#9. Miss Goodblatt would call on me to read. She said I had a talent. So on a whim, I auditioned for the High School of Performing Arts in Manhattan.

Ving Rhames

#10. It seems that our politicians see the world in black and white, so why not our artists? Did Woody Allen's 'Manhattan' have to be in black and white? No. But is it fantastic that it was? To see New York like that? Yes!

Alexander Payne

#11. The past is haunting us. In Queens, in Manhattan, it is shadowing us, punching us in the stomach. I am small, and my father is big. But the Past - it is the biggest.

Gary Shteyngart

#12. That's Manhattan today - all the money goes up top, while the infrastructure wastes away from neglect. The famous skyline is a cheap trick now, a sleight-of-hand to draw your eye from the truth, as illusory as a bodybuilder with osteoporosis.

Andrew Vachss

#13. He said Manhattan had other problems - whatever that meant. And sometimes when I looked across the water, I could swear I was seeing things. Sadie laughed about it, but once I thought I saw a flying horse. Probably just the mansion's magic barriers causing optical illusions, but still, it was weird.

Rick Riordan

#14. We lived in Yorkville, which is located on the East End of Manhattan. It's further east than Hell's Kitchen, and back then it was the kind of place where the roaches and cockroaches were big enough to carry away small children.

Bob Cousy

#15. If Broadway was a river running from the top of Manhattan down to the Battery, undulating with traffic and commerce and lights, then the east-west streets were eddies where, leaf-like, one could turn slow circles from the beginning to the ever shall be, world without end.

Amor Towles

#16. After Spain, World War II was simple. I wasn't even tempted to pick up a gun to fight for General Motors, U.S. Steel, or the Chase Manhattan Bank, even if Hitler was running the other side.

David T. Dellinger

#17. I go to Queens for queens to get the crew from Brooklyn,
Make money in Manhattan and never been tooken.
Go Uptown and the Bronx to boogie down,
Get strong on the Island, recoup, and lay around.

Rakim

#18. Outside, a ceiling of pearly gray clouds coalesced over Manhattan, and the apartment had grown dark. It just keeps dripping. It's been like this all week, .. Rain would be a relief.

Joan Didion

#19. I would rather be governed by the first 2000 people in the Manhattan phone book than the entire faculty of Harvard.

William F. Buckley Jr.

#20. At least Manhattan, in terms of danger and eccentricity, is much more of a theme park now. You couldn't really shoot the old Law & Order in New York today. It's a different city.

Chris Noth

#21. I see myself as a very successful entrepreneur. Maybe making films or else starting my own clothesline. I see myself as a corporate woman, sitting on the 16th floor of a swank office with a glass window that overlooks the Manhattan skyline.

Sushmita Sen

#22. Creative destruction is gonna be the greatest thing that can happen to Manhattan.

Jason Calacanis

#23. Believe me, I've done my time travelling the world in cramped conditions and carrying my own luggage. Now my leisure is summers in the south of France or the Hamptons, walking in Connemara, and year-round shopping in Manhattan and Paris.

Anne Robinson

#24. Brooklyn is a big fat blob with its own ugly shape across from Manhattan; it looks like Jabba the Hutt counting his money.

Ned Vizzini

#25. I think all of Manhattan has pretty much become a bar-slash-nightclub-slash-restaurant. There were always pockets of that. But now every corner of Manhattan is that.

Julian Casablancas

#26. She imagined herself whirling breathlessly beneath the flashing lights of some impossibly chic Manhattan disco. Suddenly, a hand touches her arm. She turns. 'Pardon me,' Mick Jagger says, 'I believe this next dance is mine.

Francine Pascal

#27. My own fashion sense has been influenced by 'We'll Take Manhattan.' It's gotten a little better.

Karen Gillan

#28. I'm officially near-famous. If you've got four year old kids and you've got cable, then you've got no choice but to know who I am. But if you're one of my peers - a 26-year old guy who lives in Manhattan - you have no idea who I am. I'm only famous if you're four.

Steve Burns

#29. When I was 2, I used to put pictures of the Manhattan skyline in a little scrapbook. And I used to wear American 'stars and stripe' vests and Daytona Beach stuff and they used to call me 'The Little Yankee.' Thank you to my producers for having faith in a little nobody from Lancashire.

Tracie Bennett

#30. Wanted to be home desperately, and when I said "home," that meant "wherever Larry is" more than Lower Manhattan,

Piper Kerman

#31. Don't bother starting the 10,000th restaurant in Manhattan. Find something to do that if you don't do it, it won't get done.

Peter Thiel

#32. There is a woman who swam around Manhattan, and I asked her, why? She said, it hadn't ever been done before. Well, she didn't have to do that. If she wanted to something no one had ever done before, all she had to do was vacuum my apartment.

Rita Rudner

#33. The room was not impressively large, even by Manhattan apartment-house standards, but its accumulated furnishings might have lent a snug appearance to a banquet hall in Valhalla.

J.D. Salinger

#34. When you're single, your weekend days are wide-open vistas that extend in every direction; in a relationship, they're like the sky over Manhattan: punctured, hemmed in, compressed.

Adelle Waldman

#35. Mumbai is like Manhattan. There's a certain pace, a social life and the thrill of a professional life.

Madhuri Dixit

#36. Crowds moved wherever he went, across the bridge to Manhattan, in New York, wherever he went, life flowed and eddied, but he was not part of it.

Pearl S. Buck

#37. In the 'Mad Men' era, the archetypal dad came home; put down his briefcase; received pipe, Manhattan, roast beef, potatoes, key-lime pie; and was - apparently - content.

Sandra Tsing Loh

#38. Spring and fall in New York are the best seasons here to get out and about. I like the little park in Dumbo between the Manhattan and Brooklyn bridge. I like Prospect Park.

Paul Dano

#39. You've never seen Manhattan 'til you've flown right up the East River. It's beautiful.

Cory Lidle

#40. Just two days in Manhattan and you find yourself looking for a place to wash your handkerchief after you wipe your forehead and it comes away black. Is there a dirtier or more fascinating city anywhere in the land? The answer to both parts of the question has to be positively negative.

Herb Caen

#41. Manhattan crowds, with their turbulent musical chorus! Manhattan faces and eyes forever for me.

Walt Whitman

#42. Note to self: When causing the sewer system of Manhattan to explode, do not stand underneath it.

Rick Riordan

#43. Growing up in a suburban home, the world seems so massive to you. It seems like cities are so big and so far away, and there's so much in them. So your imagination runs wild, instead of when you are born in the middle of Manhattan, you'd know, like, that this is the biggest city.

Shawn Mendes

#44. 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

#45. I jumped up in the bubble, yo kid where are you? (114 between Manhattan and Morningside Avenue) This happened just right out the blue

Big Noyd

#46. If I have open time, and I'm in Manhattan, I'll just walk to wherever I'm going, even if I could get there faster on the subway. I just love walking the streets of New York.

Siri Hustvedt

#47. What is more dramatic, even romantic, than the tumbled towers of lower Manhattan, rising suddenly to the clouds like a magic castle girdled by water? Its very touch of jumbled jaggedness, its towering-sided canyons, are its magnificence.

Jane Jacobs

#48. As far as Hip Hop Manhattan was after the Bronx.

Kool Moe Dee

#49. THE HOT (AND SERIOUSLY COOL) ENERGY that comes from the musical gospel preached by the title character of FELA! feels as if it could stretch easily to the borders of Manhattan and then across a river or two. There should be dancing in the streets!

Ben Brantley

#50. Larry Hart and Dick Rodgers were both bright Jewish boys from Manhattan who at one point or another went to Columbia, but there the similarity in their backgrounds ends.

Robert Gottlieb

#51. Manhattan, one of the most moneyed spots on the planet, also has one of the greatest concentrations of people in its skyscrapers. It's also, of course, the place where every architect wants to build his tower.

Norman Foster

#52. I have two daughters, and we live here in Manhattan, and having gone through the Manhattan kindergarten application process, nothing will ever rival the stress of that.

Tina Fey

#53. The manuscript you submit [should not] contain any flaws that you can identify - it is up to the writer to do the work, rather than counting on some stranger in Manhattan to do it for him.

Richard North Patterson

#54. During my participation in the Manhattan Project and subsequent research at Los Alamos, encompassing a period of fifteen years, I worked in the company of perhaps the greatest collection of scientific talent the world has ever known.

Frederick Reines

#55. The places where poor children face the worst odds include some - but not all - of the nation's largest urban areas, like Atlanta; Chicago; Los Angeles; Milwaukee; Orlando, West Palm Beach and Tampa in Florida; Austin, Tex.; the Bronx; and the parts of Manhattan with low-income neighborhoods.

Anonymous

#56. A new helicopter service called Gotham Air is now offering users cheap flights from Manhattan to JFK or Newark airports that start at just $99. If there's two words I trust together in the same sentence, it's 'cheap' and 'helicopter.'

Jimmy Fallon

#57. 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

#58. People born in Queens, raised to say that each morning they get on the subway and "go to the city," have a resentment of Manhattan, of the swiftness of its life and success of the people who live there.

Jimmy Breslin

#59. In Manhattan, I often do two or three or more shows a night, so I'm always working on new material.

Judah Friedlander

#60. Things Could Be Worse And Things Could Be So Much Better - that became the game, my running commentary on the streets of Manhattan, and I played it as well as the other slobs just trying to get by.

Joshua Ferris

#61. I'm no Lance Armstrong, but I do use a bike to get from place to place in Manhattan, a little bit of Brooklyn.

David Byrne

#62. (Rome) is a Metropolitan Museum of Art the size of Manhattan, no roof, no display cases, and half a million combustion engines rumbling in the hallways.

Anthony Doerr

#63. It's by far the frostiest thing I've ever seen. I'm going to be the cop who ate Manhattan.

J.D. Robb

#64. When I grew up, I was in Manhattan the whole time. But my kids have been all over the world.

David Duchovny

#65. I've yet to use a cellphone, and I've never tweeted or entered Facebook. I try not to go online till my day's writing is finished, and I moved from Manhattan to rural Japan in part so I could more easily survive for long stretches entirely on foot, and every trip to the movies would be an event.

Pico Iyer

#66. I could be on 52nd and Third in Manhattan up and ask a strange for directions and they will help you, that's a rural heart. Your car breaks down in the middle of Iowa or somewhere, or Tennessee where I'm from, people want to help each other. Given each opportunity, you see how people come together.

Rodney Atkins

#67. In 1964, when we first arrived in New York City, I remember vividly seeing the skyline of Manhattan, and our first proposal of 1964 was to wrap two lower Manhattan buildings. We never got permission.

Christo

#68. I am a curious creature and put my finger in as many cakes as I can: history, film, technology, etc. I'm also a freak for urban history, particularly Barcelona, Paris and New York. I know more weird stuff about 19th-century Manhattan than is probably healthy.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

#69. In a lot of comedies, they kind of take all the problems away from the women. They give her great clothes, great hair; she almost always owns an artisanal shop, like a cheese shop in Manhattan.

Melissa McCarthy

#70. Thou warden of the western gate, above Manhattan Bay, The fogs of doubt that hid thy face are driven clean away: Thine eyes at last look far and clear, thou liftest high thy hand To spread the light of liberty world-wide for every land.

Henry Van Dyke

#71. I remember when I saw 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,' I wanted to go out and direct a movie right there on the streets of Manhattan. Unfortunately, you can't without permits.

John Krasinski

#72. Toys R Us is closing its FAO Schwarz store on Fifth Avenue in New York City, citing the high cost of running the retail space in that location, the company said Friday. It is seeking another Manhattan space.

Anonymous

#73. I got a job writing for a financial technology newsletter in Manhattan. I didn't even understand what I was writing about. The newsletter had, like, 2,000 subscribers, and it was $700 a year for a subscription.

Darin Strauss

#74. Women of Manhattan, magnificent as they were, they forgot sometimes they weren't immortal. They could throw themselves like confetti into a fun-filled Friday night, with no thought as to what crack they fell into by Saturday.

Marisha Pessl

#75. I was born in Manhattan on West 12th. My parents were kind of hippies and they did a home birth.

Ethan Suplee

#76. So you can't live in Manhattan?' she asked.
Amos's brow furrowed as he looked across at the Empire State Building. 'Manhattan has other problems. Other gods. It's best we stay separate.

Rick Riordan

#77. Me, I'm late to meet my girlfriend. Annabeth is going to kill me.
Hope you enjoyed the stories. Stay safe out there, demigods.
Peace from Manhattan,
Percy Jackson

Rick Riordan

#78. In Manhattan last month I heard a woman borrowing the jargon of junkies to say to another, 'Want to do some chocolate?'

Diane Ackerman

#79. It is an unrepresentative city ... .They are so darn sure they are right on everything. The conventional wisdom in Manhattan, Bush believed, often failed to take opposing views into account except to dismiss such opinions as uninformed, prejudiced, and just plain wrong.

Jon Meacham

#80. Now whenever Franny or Jim spoke to someone who kept a car in Manhattan, they reacted with quiet horror, like people who'd been subjected to the rantings of a mentally ill person at a cocktail party.

Emma Straub

#81. I used to go up to her house. She lived upstate [in New York] and I lived in Manhattan; you're living in a lot of noise and my career was being built. For me to spend time with Nina [Simone] is to spend a lot of quiet time.

Nikki Giovanni

#82. There are more people living in Lower Manhattan now than before the terrorist attacks. That's faith for you. There's such a strong spirit here.

Daniel Libeskind

#83. There are two New Yorks - Manhattan and everything else. I'm a Manhattanite. I feel sorry for those people who aren't.

John Catsimatidis

#84. The Greatest Living Yankee is Whitey Ford, who came out of Aviation High School, which was then in Manhattan, and helped pitch the Yankees to victory in the 1950 World Series when he was 21.

George Vecsey

#85. I took my iPod to the Apple store here in Manhattan and asked them to replace the battery. And they explained to me that Apple does not offer a service to replace the battery in the iPod, and my best bet was to buy a new iPod.

Casey Neistat

#86. The only place where people in Manhattan walk for leisure is in the park.

Christo

#87. As Manhattan came into view, she experienced what she always felt on approaching the city from JFK; a mixture of excitement and calm, a sense of totality; of perfect, living, vibrant, chaotic peace.

Cathleen Schine

#88. When I was 12, I got a manager, but my mom was against it. It took a lot of convincing. But when I got a job at Manhattan Theatre Club, I think she saw how passionate I was about it and that I worked really hard - and now she's super supportive.

Nicola Peltz

#89. If anything, I learned most from being a huge fan of his and watching movies like Annie Hall and Manhattan over and over again - that influenced the kind of movies that I wanted to make more than anything else.

Nicole Holofcener

#90. But one sets of grandparents lived on Davidson Avenue in the Bronx and one lived in Manhattan and I had an aunt and uncle in Queens, so in my heart I was a New Yorker.

Jason Alexander

#91. I was born and raised in New York City, Manhattan, uptown.

Ana Ortiz

#92. Anyone who's lived in Manhattan all his life always feels torn whenever he leaves it. There's the satisfaction of breaking free, for a time. But that's balanced heavily by the feeling of leaving your whole life behind, and to see it from a distance.

Rachel Cohn

#93. After graduation in June of 1984, I moved to Manhattan. My first stop was a psychiatrist, who in less than our first fifty-minute session again diagnosed me with depression.

Andy Behrman

#94. I'd like to see Manhattan underwater. I'd like to see when the human population plummets and there are no more high rises, because nobody's buying them. I'm excited about that. Money and desire - all that is going to collapse, and wild green grasses are going to take over.

Hayao Miyazaki

#95. I'm a very competitive person ... I've run 12 marathons! I kayaked around Manhattan 29 miles in October! I ran the Berkshire Hathaway 5K! And I want every part of the business to compete - and play to win.

Steve Burke

#96. Wow. He's . . . hot. I met Bennett earlier, too. You guys are like the Hot Men's Club of Manhattan.

Christina Lauren

#97. I don't want to leave Manhattan, even when I'm gone,

Ed Koch

#98. So, you know, I always say that I'm a Mexican, but if I had to be a citizen of anywhere else, I'd be a citizen of Manhattan. I feel very much a New Yorker.

Alma Guillermoprieto

#99. I live in Dublin, God knows why. There are greatly more congenial places I could have settled in - Italy, France, Manhattan - but I like the climate here, and Irish light seems to be essential for me and for my writing.

John Banville

#100. I feel like when being raised in New York City I have a particular perspective on things like Gay issues maybe, because I'm in the middle of Manhattan.

Joy Behar