Top 94 Quotes About New York City Life
#1. New York City life is different from all other city life. It's incredibly relentless and fast, and I think when I first got here, it was incredibly exciting. It was also so hot. I didn't know New York got so hot. I'm not a fan of the heat!
Matthew James Thomas
#2. New York City, city of exaggerations. Place of Herculean ascensions and perilous falls.
Kurt Wenzel
#3. After living and working in Milan and Paris, I arrived in New York City 20 years ago, and I saw both the joys and the hardships of daily life. On July 28, 2006, I was very proud to become a citizen of the United States - the greatest privilege on planet Earth.
Melania Trump
#4. I just love building buildings. I'm the largest developer in New York City. I'm having a lot of fun doing it. I think I've never had more fun. I'm just enjoying my life.
Donald Trump
#5. Historically and culturally, New York City and our entire nation simply would not be the same without the infusion of Asian traditions. Whether it is food, art, language or any other facet of cultural life, Asian Americans have made our city and our country stronger and richer.
Nydia Velazquez
#6. Everybody ought to have a lower East Side in their life.
Irving Berlin
#7. I was 19 when I got my first passport as an adult. I had moved from California to New York City and was living out of a suitcase, staying with friends. I'd just finished filming my first movie, 'Ordinary People,' but I didn't know whether acting was what I wanted to do with my life.
Timothy Hutton
#8. A self-help story about a man who overcomes circumstance by reminiscing over his own life's lessons. Inspired, he sets out at night on the gritty streets of New York City to capture the beauty of life thru his passion for photography.
Amazon
#9. At least three times a week, I am overwhelmed with a wave of gratitude to New York City for providing me with a life. Not that my life is so great, although I think it's pretty nifty: I don't mine coal; I get paid to write.
David Rakoff
#10. I grew up thinking that renting is perfectly normal. And then, strangely enough, I never did buy a house. I live in New York City, and I'm still renting. My own personal narrative shows that it is possible to live a respectable life without ever having owned a home.
Edmund Phelps
#11. I thought that once I got to this city nothing could ever catch up with me because I could remake my life daily. Once that had made me feel infinite. Now I was certain I would never learn. Being remade was the same thing as being constantly undone.
Stephanie Danler
#12. And it is always Easter Sunday at the New York City Ballet. It is always coming back to life. Not even coming back to life - it lives in the constant present.
John Guare
#13. To paraphrase Shakespeare's Polonius, you sometimes have to get your hands a little dirty to set things straight.
Lynn Steward
#14. There were a few nighttime pedestrians on the block, but they continued on their way, dutifully ignoring the zombie vomiting blood out of the back of my car. Good old New Yorkers. They really couldn't care less.
Nicholas Kaufmann
#15. I want to feel like I'm making a difference in this world. And I want some time for living rather than just working. Life is for living, isn't it? It can't be all just for working
Zack Love
#16. I can't with any conscience argue for New York with anyone. It's like Calcutta. But I love the city in an emotional, irrational way, like loving your mother or your father even though they're a drunk or a thief. I've loved the city my whole life - to me, it's like a great woman.
Woody Allen
#17. I ran the effort to bring the 2012 Olympic Games to New York City. We lost - on a global scale. To my surprise, life went on, and I learnt that nobody cares about your failures as much as you do.
Daniel L. Doctoroff
#18. My boyhood life in New York City has impressed me with the popular ignorance and also with the great need of something better than local lore and weather proverbs.
Cleveland Abbe
#19. We were up the whole night just talking, walking the city. You can walk those blocks forever, take a break on the edge of the fountain, eat pizza and snow cones, awed by the human carnival all around you.
Marisha Pessl
#20. I close my eyes. An image flashes - emerging from the van with Julian after our escape from New York City; believing, in that moment, that we had escaped the worst, that life would begin again for us.
Instead life has only grown harder.
Lauren Oliver
#21. Youth is marked by a breathtaking novelty that diminishes with each year of age - until life becomes a delusive struggle to break routines, escape the ordinary, and rediscover the joy of discovery.
Zack Love
#22. New York is strange in the summer. Life goes on as usual but it's not, it's like everyone is just pretending, as if everyone has been cast as the star in a movie about their life, so they're one step removed from it. And then in September it all gets normal again.
Peter Cameron
#23. When a movie opened - if you lived in New York, you would see it at Radio City Music Hall where it would play a couple of weeks, and then you moved on to the next movie. Now you can see it the rest of your life - it's going to be on Netflix and DVD.
Robert Osborne
#24. She loved the way her city always sounded like it was celebrating.
Sarah Pekkanen
#25. Dana's window? More like her snow globe, Janice thought. She pictured Dana standing in a tiny glass-enclosed world, snow gently falling around her. Her world could be shaken but never broken. She was far too insulated.
Lynn Steward
#26. A New York plate that said you die. (Dark City Lights)
Ed Park
#27. Like surgeons trying to save a life, the conservators and preservers at New York City museums dedicate themselves to ensuring the longevity of works of art for public view.
Simon Van Booy
#29. 'Privileged,' without a doubt, was one of the best work experiences of my life. Every crew member cried when we got canceled. But I was then given the opportunity to be in New York and on 'Gossip Girl' and spend the summer in a city that I've absolutely fallen in love with.
Joanna Garcia
#30. New York is the cubist, the futurist city. It expresses in its architecture, its life, its spirit, the modern thought.
Francis Picabia
#32. As the trees turned red, then white, then naked as pitchforks, Margot and Xiao Chen immersed themselves in several forests' worth of pages, and I watched, tortured, as brick after brick of a new development was laid on the wasteland of Midtown West like slabs of gold bullion.
Carolyn Jess-Cooke
#33. Like Israel, New York City's history has been defined by immigrants who come in search of freedom and the opportunity to build a better life. And like Israel, New York City has remained a target for terrorists who seek to destroy that freedom
Michael Bloomberg
#34. For you cannot live in New York City very long and not be conscious of the niceties of being rich - the city is, after all, an ecstatic exercise in merchandising - and one evening of his visit to Venezuela Sutherland sat straight up when he read a line of Santayana's: Money is the petrol of life.
Andrew Holleran
#35. Even though New York may be a more inspiring city, I get more inspired thinking of L.A., in a way. My life there was so much more simple in mind, and quiet.
Aleksa Palladino
#36. I believed in fictional characters as if they were a part of real life. Poetry was important, too. My parents had memorized poems from their days attending school in New York City and loved reciting them. We all enjoyed listening to these poems and to music as well.
Alice McDermott
#37. Dating Advice: If you want your life partner to be a vegetarian, move to New York City.
Paul Oyer
#38. When I was a little kid, all I wanted to do was to escape what I thought was the country and get to a city. Probably film and television had influenced me so much, I really thought the key to happiness was living a very artificial life in a penthouse in New York with martini glasses.
Tom Ford
#39. Everyone can access the parts of themselves that are great. I'm just a girl from New York City who decided to do this, after all. Rule the world! What's life worth living if you don't rule it?
Lady Gaga
#40. Lost in New York City. Not that I don't know where I am, but rather perplexed as to where I am going.
Christy Hall
#41. Meanwhile the temperature is getting hotter and hotter so no one can think clearly. No one perceives. No one cares. Insane madness come out like life is a terrific party.
Kathy Acker
#42. New York City in life was much like New York City in death. It was still hard to get a cab, for example.
Colson Whitehead
#43. Most of my life, I thought that I would end up a novelist. But then, in New York City, after college, I started a company with a college friend where we made documentary video for museums. In that capacity, I shot, directed, edited and began to learn the vocabulary of film.
Jon Spaihts
#44. I moved to New York when I was 17 and I had no idea what I was doing. I really thought I was going to take that city by storm and it taught me a lot; it was like the school of life. For me, it was like a series of really hilarious experiences in New York with getting jobs and getting fired.
Dreama Walker
#45. I remember my own life as a small boy, son of Jewish immigrants, in a janitor's flat on Orchard and Stanton streets on the Lower East Side of New York City. My father made pants and doubled as janitor of a tenement - before he made janitoring at $30 a month, plus rooms, a career.
Jacob K. Javits
#46. Being on the stage in New York is always exciting because you feel like you're part of the life of the city.
Alan Rickman
#47. The life of a dancer is tragically short. What is remarkable about the New York City Ballet is that it makes us forget that. Because it keeps the ballet alive.
John Guare
#48. At long last, I had found myself vulnerable to the worst of New York City, because at 44 my life was not so different from the way it was at 24.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#49. The city was a hive from this height, the people and the yellow cabs moving about in the street below like pre-programmed insects. (Dark City Lights)
David Levien
#50. Have you ever experienced a beauty of soul, an esthetic grace, that was so intense it made you want to cry?
From Central Park Song ( A Screenplay )
Zack Love
#51. I'm constantly warning people that are involved in my life that I can go busk and make a living. I can make my rent in New York City in the subway, I promise, if I'm forced to.
Steve Earle
#52. The streets of New York and some wards of its venerable institutions were packed with people who, despite being entirely forsaken, had episodes of glory that made the career of Alexander the Great seem like a day in the life of a file clerk.
Mark Helprin
#53. I'm a New Yorker. I was there during 9/11 and I saw how, not only New York City stopped for a moment, we all took an inhale and exhale at the same time - the world united at that time, and it changed my life.
Aisha Hinds
#54. Tad's mission in life is to have more fun than anyone else in New York City, and this involves a lot of moving around, since there is always the likelihood that where you aren't is more fun than where you are.
Jay McInerney
#55. New York presented a paradox. While foreigners thought of New York has the symbol of America, many Americans viewed the city with some suspicion as the country's most foreign.
Charles Emmerson
#56. The circumstances of everyday life were too demanding-and in American's great cities, appalling.
Charles E. Rosenberg
#57. I grew up in New York and have lived here all my life. I think it's the best city in the world and can write about it with gusto and fervor and passion.
M.J. Rose
#58. I think everyone should live in New York City if they ever get the chance at least once in their life. It's such a great place to live; there's a different energy about living in the city.
Odette Annable
#59. Maybe the price of forgetting that even in America, even in New York City, when a man back home is talking, you better listen closely.
Brian Koppelman
#60. Don't get me wrong - I enjoy my real life, but I feel about it much the way I do about New York City, my chosen and adored home: I'm always happy to leave, and I'm always happy to come back.
Jennifer Egan
#61. I went to an ordinary school in New York City with no other actors. I learned to compartmentalise different parts of my life. I was one person at home and then another person at work and for that reason my career didn't challenge my family life.
Brooke Shields
#62. New York City is filled with random, quirky moments like this, chance collisions that just might change your life.
Hope Edelman
#63. You may discover that the very aspects which make it most unendurable are what gives New York its meaning. Its inconsistencies and anonymity, its seeming indifference to you and every other individual is really what makes it a safe haven for individuals everywhere (Maeve Brennan)
Elizabeth Winder
#64. The knife of corruption endangered the life of New York City. The scalpel of the law is making us well again.
Edward I. Koch
#65. New York is a great place to be fed in the arts. The arts in general are a large part of my life. The city was my postgraduate course.
Kathleen Battle
#66. Nothing makes you feel smaller than New York City ...
Christy Hall
#67. Everyone has their own New York in the heart, place where there is hope for everybody.
T.A
#68. Probably everything in my life comes back to a feeling of abandonment, and this city never abandons you.
Ann Douglas
#69. The woman was Diana Vreeland, the high priestess of fashion and legendary fashion editor of Harper's Bazaar and editor-in-chief of Vogue. Dana paused, eyes wide. Well, perhaps she was a bit star-struck after all.
Lynn Steward
#70. Its all big money, high rent, high prices in New York City now. The poor people completely got rolled over. I've never seen anything like it in my life. It's disgusting.
Ralph Bakshi
#71. Last summer had meant lots of Sam Adams Summer Ale by herself on hot weekend days when it seemed like just her and the Dominican Day parade.
Stephanie Clifford
#72. When life hands you lemons, why stop at lemonade? Create an entire product line.
Gina Greenlee
#73. Bernier turned in her chair, smiled, and shook their hands. Dana's heart skipped a beat as she stood inches away from one of New York's most glamorous and adored women.
Lynn Steward
#75. My friend Josh grew up in New York City in the '80s and led an extraordinarily active social life and likes to point out how extraordinary social lives were possible long before people started carrying around phones. You simply made a plan and kept it.
Jason Gay
#76. That was 1993 grunge in suburbia. This was 2003 hell in Harlem. (Dark City Lights)
Eve Kagan
#77. You're telling me a shape-shifting demon just walked out onto Fifth Avenue and blended in with the crowd?" I asked. "Hailed a fucking cab after tearing everyone to pieces down here?
Nicholas Kaufmann
#78. 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.
E.B. White
#80. A year earlier my parents had moved us out of the city to a split-level on Long Island, their idea of the American dream, which meant it as now an hour-and-a-half commute via the 7:06 Hicksville to Penn Station every morning. (Dark City Lights)
Jonathan Santlofer
#81. In the Shadow of Slavery covers two and a half centuries of black life in New York City, and skillfully interweaves the categories of race and class as they affected the formation of African American identity. Leslie Harris has made a major contribution to our understanding of the black experience.
Eric Foner
#82. An unlimited supply of wonder and trust, bolsters life lived as a process of discovery.
Gina Greenlee
#83. New York used to be so much more than just a place to shop. It was life on the street for the eccentrics; it was an eccentric city. It had many different tastes. Now it's just one - a really rich one - with big tall glass buildings.
Chris Noth
#84. Living in New York City, I am reminded by the Statue of Liberty that the United States of America has always welcomed those yearning to breathe free and seek a better life.
Charles B. Rangel
#85. 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
#87. I was enamored of New York City intellectual life and was really into Philip Roth because I was raised by self-loathing Midwesterners who were from southern Illinois, who felt like fish out of water when they came to the East Coast when I was a kid.
Meghan Daum
#88. Give full attention to life's moments
and the images you capture will be everlasting.
Gina Greenlee
#89. In those early years in New York when I was a stranger in a big city, it was the companionship and later friendship which I was offered in the Linnean Society that was the most important thing in my life.
Ernst Mayr
#90. Just like life, it was over much too soon. And just like life, there weren't any answers. But like that one-in-an-eight-million great New York moment, I didn't need one. (Dark City Lights)
Peter Carlaftes
#91. I heaved into being, came out of the stone, the bricks, and other elements, and took form. (Dark City Lights)
Jerrold Mundis
#92. Was this what the city would look like when knowledge was no longer enough? When the desire to turn inward, surrendering entirely to one's own private world of nonresistance, overwhelmed, like creeping ivy, our desire to know worlds beyond it?
Olivia Sudjic
#93. Knowing even as I craved permanence in New York City, that would never come to pass. The pair of us would live for as long as we could. As well as well could. That was all. Then we'd blow away like wishes made on dandelion heads.
Lyndsay Faye
#94. I walk down the street and people don't go, 'My God, there he is.' I lead as normal a life as you can lead in New York City.
Graydon Carter
