This post features 50 quotes about New York City.
Ah New York, there’s no place like it. There aren’t many cities in the world that can capture your heart the way that New York does. Whether it’s the shimmering skyline, the hustle and bustle of the streets, or the diverse people it attracts, New York has a way of leaving it’s mark. It’s no wonder that people try to attempt to capture the magic of New York in songs, movies, and books.
For when you want to tap into that New York feeling, here’s a list of 50 quotes about New York City.
50 Quotes About New York City
- “If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere.” – Frank Sinatra
- “London is satisfied, Paris is resigned, but New York is always hopeful. Always it believes that something good is about to come off, and it must hurry to meet it.” – Dorothy Parker
- “I love New York because you’re in your own little bubble, and the world goes on outside of it, and you don’t have to care about it if you don’t want to.” – Jerry Seinfeld
- “The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.” – John Updike
- “If Louis was right, and you only get one great love, New York may just be mine. And I can’t have nobody talking shit about my boyfriend.” – Carrie Bradshaw on Sex and the City
- “There is no question that there is an unseen world. The problem is, how far is it from midtown and how late is it open?” – Woody Allen
- “One can’t paint New York as it is, but rather as it is felt.” – Georgia O’Keefe
- “New York is not a city, it’s a world.” – Truman Capote
- “I was superstitious. Today was a Monday. I was born on Monday. It was a good day to arrive in New York City. No one expected me. Everything awaited me.” – Patti Smith
- “People go to LA to “find themselves”, they come to New York to become someone new.” – Lindsey Kelk
- “This is the city, and I am one of the citizens/Whatever interests the rest interests me” – Walt Whitman
- “New York is an ugly city, a dirty city. Its climate is a scandal, its politics are used to frighten children, its traffic is madness, its competition is murderous. But there is one thing about it – once you have lived in New York and it has become your home, no place else is good enough.” – John Steinbeck
- “I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York’s skyline.” – Ayn Rand
- “When it’s 100 degrees in New York, it’s 72 in Los Angeles. When it’s 30 degrees in New York, in Los Angeles it’s still 72. However, there are 6 million interesting people in New York, and only 72 in Los Angeles.” – Neil Simon
- “The true New Yorker is not someone who was born in New York, but someone who couldn’t live anywhere else.” – Ariel Sabar
- “In New York, you’re always looking for a job, a boyfriend, or an apartment.” – Carrie Bradshaw
- “New York ladies all look immaculate.” – Zac Posen
- “New York is a city of possibility and endless exploration. There’s always something new to discover around every corner.” – Elizabeth Gilbert
- “If London is a watercolor, New York is an oil painting.” – Peter Shaffer
- “In New York, even on the darkest days, the sun always shines somewhere.” – J.D. Robb.
- “I love New York, even though it isn’t mine, the way something has to be, a tree or a street or a house, something, anyway, that belongs to me because I belong to it.” – Truman Capote
- “Quite simply, I was in love with New York. I do not mean “love” in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and you never love anyone quite that way again.” – Joan Didion
- “I go to Paris, I go to London, I go to Rome, and I always say, “There’s no place like New York. It’s the most exciting city in the world now. That’s the way it is. That’s it.” – Robert De Niro
- “New York is the meeting place of the peoples, the only city where you can hardly find a typical American.” – Djuna Barnes
- “There’s something so romantic about being broke in New York. You gotta do it. You have to live there once without any money, and then you have to live there when you have money. Let me tell you, of the two, the latter is far better.” – Amy Poehler
- “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
- “Skyscraper national park.” – Kurt Vonnegut
- “Don’t you love New York in the fall? It makes me want to buy school supplies. I would send you a bouquet of newly sharpened pencils if I knew your name and address.” – Nora Ephron
- “New York is a city of superlatives, a place where the best, the brightest, the biggest is the norm.” – Marilyn J. Appleberg
- “Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness; natives give it solidity and continuity; but the settlers give it passion.” – E.B. White
- “When you leave New York, you are astonished at how clean the rest of the world is. Clean is not enough.” – Fran Lebowitz
- “My hometown New York also has a big heart. It doesn’t like to see itself in that way, but we do come together when need be…” – Anthony Bourdain
- “There is something in the New York air that makes sleep useless.” – Simone de Beauvoir
- “I’d rather be a lamppost on Seventh Avenue than a queen in another country.” – Grace Watson
- “When I’m in New York, I just want to walk down the street and feel this thing, like I’m in a movie.” – Ryan Adams
- “If you want to become a real New Yorker, there’s only one rule: You have to believe New York is, has been, and always will be the greatest city on earth. The center of the universe.” – Ellen R. Shapiro
- “In New York, you can be a new man.” – Lin-Manuel Miranda
- “New York is a different country. Maybe it ought to have a separate government. Everybody thinks differently, they just don’t know what the hell the rest of the United States is.” – Henry Ford
- “Make your mark in New York and you are a made man.” – Mark Twain
- “New York is a vibrant city. It’s everything you’ve heard it is. It’s crazy, it’s horrible, it’s magnificent, it’s beautiful. It’s hard to become a real grown-up in, because it really lends itself to a good time. It’s a real live wire, hard to leave, like a living, breathing entity in your life.” – Whoopi Goldberg
- “One belongs to New York instantly, one belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years.” – Tom Wolfe
- “New York has romanced me unlike anything else.” – Blake Lively
- “I love New York, you’re never alone but always on your own.” – Blair Waldorf
- “Living in New York gives people real incentives to want things that nobody else wants.” – Andy Warhol
- “You know what’s great about New York? The threshold for citizenship as a New Yorker is actually pretty short. If you come to New York and you still like it two years after you arrived here, and you still think it’s great and you’re having a good time and you haven’t been just totally ground down and go limping back to wherever the f*ck you came from, you know what? You’re in!” – Anthony Bourdain
- “I love New York on summer afternoons when every one’s away. There’s something very sensuous about it.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald
- “I feel about New York as a child whose father is a bank robber. Not perfect, but I still love him.” – Woody Allen
- “It is a miracle that New York works at all. The whole thing is implausible.” – E.B. White
- “New York City goes beyond words. It’s a feeling, a state of mind. It’s an extraordinary sense of belonging and inspiration.” – Louise Bay
- “New Yorkers are born all over the country, and then they come to New York City and it hits them: Oh, that’s who I am.” – Delia Ephron
That concludes this compilation of quotes about New York.