Top 100 The New Yorker Quotes
#1. Speaking as a New Yorker, I found it (9/11 event] a shocking and terrifying event, particularly the scale of it. At bottom, it was an implacable desire to do harm to innocent people.
Edward Said
#2. I spent my childhood in New York, riding on subways and buses. And you know what you learn if you're a New Yorker? The world doesn't owe you a damn thing.
Lauren Bacall
#3. 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
#4. A real New Yorker likes the sound of a garbage truck in the morning.
R.L. Stine
#5. A Michigander can be every bit as prickly as a New Yorker, just not out loud. The Midwesterner's credo: keep it to yourself.
James Hynes
#6. I grew up in New York City - I grew up surrounded by every sound that you imagine can come from a New Yorker. All of the different boroughs and all of the different sounds.
Maggie Wheeler
#7. I have no credentials. I have no money. I literally come from a poor place. I was a servant. I dropped out of college. The next thing you know I'm writing for the 'New Yorker,' I have this sort of life, and it must seem annoying to people.
Jamaica Kincaid
#8. It was memorable the first time 'The New Yorker' bought a cartoon from me. I had been sending them batches for years every week, and they didn't respond to them.
Bruce Eric Kaplan
#9. I aspired from early on to write a novel, to be in the 'New Yorker,' to be on Broadway, and at least in a fleeting way, I got all those things.
Mark O'Donnell
#10. Commas in The New Yorker fall with the precision of knives in a circus act, outlining the victim.
E.B. White
#11. The brevity of our lives breeds a kind of temporal parochialism - an ignorance of or an indifference to those planetary gears which turn more slowly than our own.
Kathryn Schulz
#12. A New Yorker is anyone who has the guts to really live in the city.
Rita Ora
#13. In a subway car, my skin would typically fall in the middle of the color spectrum. On street corners, tourists would ask me for directions. I was, in four and a half years, never an American; I was immediately a New Yorker.
Mohsin Hamid
#14. I felt uncomfortable calling myself a writer until I started with 'The New Yorker,' and then I was like, 'Okay, now you can call yourself that.'
David Sedaris
#15. I have never been prouder to be a lifelong New Yorker than I am today with the passage of marriage equality.
Cyndi Lauper
#16. The most offensive thing that ever occurred in 'The New Yorker' would be, like, the mildest thing at a Chris Rock concert.
Robert Mankoff
#17. The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.
John Updike
#18. Yes, I'm a New Yorker, born and bred. While I'm not quite the L.A. snob that Woody Allen is, I do find myself happier in New York.
Corey Stoll
#19. In the end, the only thing the true New Yorker knows about New York is that it is unknowable.
Pete Hamill
#20. When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.
[As attributed by Alastair Reid in Neruda and Borges, The New Yorker, June 24, 1996; as well as in The Talk of the Town, The New Yorker, July 7, 1986]
Jorge Luis Borges
#21. Then, gradually, women began to enter vet schools. By 1975, they represented half of all students; by 2000, nearly three-quarters - and most of them wanted to treat pets.
The New Yorker
#22. I feel like I just have such the blood and bones of a New Yorker that I can almost imagine better, like, giving up the fight and not being able to afford the city and going out West, keeping a small place here, and then when I'm like 80, coming back here, living on the park and going to the theater.
Natasha Lyonne
#23. You can always tell a rich New York girl from a poor one. And you can tell a rich Boston girl from a poor one. After all, that's what accents and manners are there for. But to the native New Yorker, the midwestern girls all looked and sounded the same. Sure, the
Amor Towles
#24. Miss Ross has room in her heart for the entire animal kingdom, she focusses principally on cats because she thinks they are victims of prejudice and bigotry.
The New Yorker
#25. 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
#26. When you live in New York, one of two things happen - you either become a New Yorker, or you feel more like the place you came from.
Al Franken
#28. But the truth is, the ten or twenty minutes I was somebody's mother were black magic. There is no adventure I would trade them for; there is no place I would rather have seen.
-Thanksgiving in Mongolia, The New Yorker, November 18, 2013 Issue
Ariel Levy
#29. As Adam Gopnik remarked in The New Yorker, "Post-modernist art is, above all, post-audience art." In
David Bayles
#30. What the New Yorker calls home would seem like a couple of closets to most Americans, yet he manages not only to live there but also to grow trees and cockroaches right on the premises.
Russell Baker
#31. Toronto is a special city, and the environment is perfect for the arts; free and alive. I'm a New Yorker, and Toronto reminds me of a much cleaner New York, so it's like coming home after your mom just cleaned your room for you; for me that's a lovely environment.
Emory Cohen
#32. I wanted to be a literary writer, so I wrote story after story and sent them to 'The New Yorker.'
Diane Mott Davidson
#33. I have published in 'The New Yorker,' 'Holiday,' 'Life,' 'Mademoiselle,' 'American Heritage,' 'Horizon,' 'The Ladies Home Journal,' 'The Kenyon Review,' 'The Sewanee Review,' 'Poetry,' 'Botteghe Oscure,' the 'Atlantic Monthly,' 'Harper's.'
Paul Engle
#34. Thou shalt not live within thy means
Nor on plain water and raw greens.
If thou must choose
Between the chances, choose the odd;
Read The New Yorker, trust in God;
And take short views.
W. H. Auden
#35. I think one of the best jobs in the universe must be being the editor of 'The New Yorker', but there are a number of magazines that I'd be excited to be the editor of. They would be 'Wired', 'The New Yorker' and probably, 'Vogue'.
Michael Wolf
#36. You can do what you like, sir, but I'll tell you this. New York is the true capital of America. Every New Yorker knows it, and by God, we always shall.
Edward Rutherfurd
#37. I'm a New Yorker, and I jaywalk with the best of them.
Sonia Sotomayor
#38. Beware: I'm unafraid to host a big spoiler party--a novel that can be truly "spoiled" by the summary of its plot is a novel that was already spoiled by that plot.
James Wood
#39. A natural New Yorker is a native of the present tense.
V.S. Pritchett
#40. I am a New Yorker, and 7:00 A.M. is a civilized hour to finish the day, not to start it.
Sonia Sotomayor
#41. I see a New York where there is no barrier to the God-given potential of every New Yorker. I see a New York where everyone who wants a good job can find one. I see a New York where the people can believe in a grounded government again.
Carl Paladino
#42. Every writer at the New Yorker is smarter than me.
Bob Dylan
#43. Dad and I did not care at all for your story in The New Yorker ... [I]t does seem, dear, that this gloomy kind of story is what all you young people think about these days. Why don't you write something to cheer people up?
Shirley Jackson
#44. General literature without the humbug," was the New Yorker's original mission.
Harold Holzer
#45. Chandler again: "I have never liked anyone who disliked cats, because I've always found an element of acute selfishness in their dispositions.
The New Yorker
#46. New York's my home. Born and raised. I'm a New Yorker to the bone.
Vanessa Ferlito
#47. I've little in common with the scene in Silicon Valley and San Francisco. I'm a New Yorker.
Jon Oringer
#48. I'm not a reporter but the 'New Yorker' treats everyone like a reporter.
David Sedaris
#49. There are few people who exemplify the ideals of opportunity, entrepreneurship and commitment to the collective good than the great New Yorker and the face of the $10 bill, Alexander Hamilton.
Eric Schneiderman
#50. The title of the poems was The Only Bar in Dixon. We sent it out to The New Yorker on a fluke, and they took them and printed all three in the same issue.
James Welch
#51. In New York, all the crews read 'The New Yorker.' In Los Angeles, they don't know from 'The New Yorker.'
Bruce Eric Kaplan
#52. Feeling is taboo, especially in New York. I read in some little magazine the other day that The New Yorker and The New York Times were sclerotic, meaning, "completely turned to rock." The critics here are that way.
James Purdy
#53. The older I get the more grateful I am not to be told how everything comes out.
Mavis Gallant
#54. My parents put the New Yorker in my crib. I saw Vogue and Vanity Fair around the house before I could read.
Richard Avedon
#55. One of the perks of being a 'New Yorker' cartoonist is that you get to hang around with interesting people. My fellow cartoonists are all interesting, and all highly creative.
Liza Donnelly
#56. I read the 'New Yorker' when I was a kid. I used to love the cartoons and pick the cartoons out of the library, so I felt I knew the world of their cartoons.
Bruce Eric Kaplan
#57. The dangerous man is the one who has only one idea, because then he'll fight and die for it.
[As quoted in The New Yorker, April 25, 2011]
Francis Crick
#58. The New Yorker has devoted itself for 59 years not only to facts and literal accuracy but to truth. And truth begins, journalistically, with the facts.
William Shawn
#59. I always have issues with trust. I'm a New Yorker ... Really, I think trust is something that comes from the gut. And I think you have to - it's probably the worst advice to give people - but I think you gotta trust people from your gut.
Vin Diesel
#60. As a New Yorker you can't help but be proud of the fact that so much music and culture started here. Punk rock, jazz, hip-hop and house music started here, George Gershwin debuted 'Rhapsody in Blue' here; the Velvet Underground are from New York.
Moby
#61. Activating is about changing people's perceptions of overlooked or invisible spaces. A building can become an archetype, invisible, like for a New Yorker, for example, the Statue of Liberty. You look at it, and it disappears into the thousands of times you've already seen it.
Chris Jordan
#62. I'm a New Yorker. I like the big streets and the big buildings. It's a great place to walk.
Ed Askew
#63. I don't profess any religion; I don't think it's possible that there is a God; I have the greatest difficulty in understanding what is meant by the words 'spiritual' or 'spirituality.'
[Interview, The New Yorker, Dec. 26, 2005]
Philip Pullman
#64. When I took over 'The New Yorker,' there was a very, very good, smart staff in place.
Tina Brown
#65. 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
#66. But there is a place where people like me live and love while fretting constantly about their own mortality and the fate of the universe. I know who I am now: I am a New Yorker.
Mara Wilson
#67. I'll show Luke I can fit into the city. I'll show him I can be a true New Yorker. I'll go the gym, and then I'll eat a bagel, and I'll ... shoot someone, maybe?
Or maybe just the gym will be enough.
Sophie Kinsella
#68. The sudden approximation of my dull, provincial life to a New Yorker cartoon was exhilarating.
Alison Bechdel
#69. You know how it is - you start with one tiger, then you get another and another, then a few are born and a few die, and you start to lose track of details like exactly how many tigers you actually have.
The New Yorker
#70. Dillinger is an epicure, serenely removed from such soft and bourgeois considerations as loyalty and disloyalty, and her only anxiety in life is to better herself aesthetically.
The New Yorker
#71. I have never lived in New York City, but a lot of people think that I am a New Yorker, because I was embraced by the Downtown scene since the 1980s. For the record I was born and raised in Los Angeles, California.
Vaginal Davis
#72. After the phone call from The New Yorker, I walked more than a mile to church to thank God. But then I told God I would talk to Him another time and darted home.
Uwem Akpan
#73. I realized the other day that I've lived in New York longer than I've lived anywhere else. It's amazing: I am a New Yorker. It's strange; I never thought I would be.
David Bowie
#74. It was actually an Israeli cartoonist, Nurit Karlin, who made me think that I could draw for 'The New Yorker.' I saw her work published in the magazine in the early 1970s - she was the only woman working as a cartoonist at 'The New Yorker' at the time.
Liza Donnelly
#75. I'm an unabashed fan of 'The New Yorker.' I do feel proud when I see my artwork in there.
Adrian Tomine
#76. Jincy Willett, Sam Lipsyte, Flannery O'Connor, and George Saunders. Oh, and I love Paul Rudnick in The New Yorker.
Pamela Paul
#77. I'm never going to accomplish anything; that's perfectly clear to me. I'm never going to be famous. My name will never be writ large on the roster of Those Who Do Things. I don't do anything. Not one single thing. I used to bite my nails, but I don't even do that any more.
Dorothy Parker
#78. Narrative secrets are not the same as human mysteries, a lesson that novelists seem fates to forget, again and again; the former quickly confess themselves, and fall silent, while the true mysteries go on speaking.
James Wood
#79. Maybe it's wrong-footed trying to fit people into the world, rather than trying to make the world a better place for people.
[as quoted in "Brain Gain" by Margaret Talbot, The New Yorker, 4/27/09 issue]
Paul McHugh
#80. Any real New Yorker is a you-name-it-we-have-it-snob whose heart brims with sympathy for the millions of unfortunates who through misfortune, misguidedness or pure stupidity live anywhere else in the world.
Russell Lynes
#81. I think many articles in the New Yorker have a strong point of view, but they are so rigorously fact-checked. I wouldn't call them objective, but they feel fair.
Alex Gibney
#83. Having recorded his first album, 'Tapestry,' in 1969, in Berkeley, California, during the student riots, McLean, a native New Yorker, became a kind of weather vane for what he called the 'generation lost in space.'
Douglas Brinkley
#84. [Raymond Chandler] wrote as if pain hurt and life mattered.
The New Yorker
#85. In his New Yorker column of July 27, 1957, E. B. White praised the "little book" as a "forty-three-page summation of the case for cleanliness, accuracy, and brevity in the use of English.
William Strunk Jr.
#86. A typical native New Yorker, I'm prone to wearing the city's unofficial sartorial color: black.
Amanda Hearst
#87. Just because you read a report in the 'New York Times,' the 'Economist,' or, yes, 'The New Yorker' doesn't make it true. But we do know that a few people have evaluated that story with what strikes me as fairly objective standards of reason.
Michael Specter
#88. I am aware of myself as a four-hundred-year-old woman, born in the captivity of a colonial, pre-industrial oral culture and living now as a contemporary New Yorker.
Bharati Mukherjee
#89. 'The New Yorker's' drama critics have always had a comparable authority because, for the most part, the magazine made it a practice to employ critics who moonlighted in the arts. They worked both sides of the street, so to speak.
John Lahr
#90. Sometimes with 'The New Yorker,' they have grammar rules that just don't feel right in my mouth.
David Sedaris
#91. I don't mind other guys seeing movies I want to see and then writing about them. That's fine, especially when it's the 'New Yorker's Anthony Lane, because he knows this stuff pretty well.
Rachel Sklar
#92. After the New Yorker piece I decided that I would never give another interview to anyone on any subject and that I would keep away from all places where I would be likely to be interviewed. If you say nothing it is difficult for someone to get it wrong.
Ernest Hemingway,
#93. 'The New Yorker's fiction podcast I like a lot, where they have authors pick short stories by other authors that appeared in 'The New Yorker.'
Gillian Jacobs
#94. I used to never miss the 'New Yorker' or 'New York.' Now I never bother.
Dan Jenkins
#95. If you appear in the 'Atlantic' or 'Harper's' or the 'New Yorker,' by God, you must be a writer, because everybody says so.
Kurt Vonnegut
#96. If sometimes there seems to be a sort of sameness of sound in The New Yorker, it probably can be traced to the magazine's copydesk, which is a marvelous fortress of grammatical exactitude and stylish convention.
E.B. White
#97. As an old-time New Yorker, it's not that I miss the '70s and '80s or whatever. I miss the fact that there was a certain kind of energy that exists when people can live for nothing.
Abel Ferrara
#99. I lived in New York City for a while and miss it like it's a person. Although I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, I'm a New Yorker at heart. A stroll through Central Park, a visit to the MET, a show on Broadway. There is no other city like it in the world!
Zoe McLellan
#100. I've been a New Yorker for ten years, and the only people who are nice to us turn out to be Moonies.
P. J. O'Rourke
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