Quotes About Manhattan New York

“Back and forth from Brooklyn to Manhattan. New York at night, from its bridges, is a miracle. When I first came to the city, it took all my fantasies and set them on fire, turned them into flickering constellations of light. Then it did the same with my history. As a dark speck of energy hurtling over the water toward that galaxy, I felt myself disappear. Relative to the image of infinity I was nothing, a clump of quantum matter skidding through the ether. It was as good as any drug.”

— Melissa Febos

“You want proof evolution is for real, don't waste your time with fossils; just check out the New York City rat. They started out as immigrants, stowaways in some ship's cargo hold. Only the survivors got to breed, and they've been improving with every new
litter. Smarter, faster, stronger. Getting ready to rule. Manhattan wouldn't be the first island they took over.”

— Andrew Vachss

“I wasn't hanging around the movie theaters in New York where I grew up, a Manhattan brat.”

— Peter Bart

“To see what Times Square looked like before a city was there, we turn to a remarkable project called Welikia, which grew out of a smaller project called Mannahatta. The Welikia project has produced a detailed ecological map of the landscape in New York City at the time of the arrival of Europeans. The interactive map, available online at welikia.org, is a fantastic snapshot of a different New York. In 1609, the island of Manhattan was part of a landscape of rolling hills, marshes, woodlands, lakes, and rivers.”

— Randall Munroe

“It is an art form to hate New York City properly. So far I have always been a featherweight debunker of New York; it takes too much energy and endurance to record the infinite number of ways the city offends me. Were I to list them all, I would fill up a book the size of the Manhattan yellow pages, and that would merely be the prologue. Every time I submit myself to the snubs and indignities of that swaggering city and set myself adrift among the prodigious crowds, a feeling of displacement, profound and enervating, takes me over, killing all the coded cells of my hard-won singularity. The city marks my soul with a most profane, indelible graffiti. There is too much of too much there.”

— Pat Conroy

“'Manhattan Love Story' has a very special place in my heart for many reasons. We were very sad to see it go. It brought me to New York, and there's nothing better than getting to go to work and fall for Analeigh Tipton every day.”

— Jake McDorman

“I was born and raised in New York City, Manhattan, uptown.”

— Ana Ortiz

“Seeing New York in the movies is what made me want to live in Manhattan one day. I eventually got my wish, and the city has never disappointed me.”

— Robert Osborne

“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

“I live in New York City, and one day many years ago I was with a poet, Gregory Corso, walking through Greenwich Village. He pointed to a doorway in an alley that he said led to a tunnel under Manhattan, a tunnel he'd use to run from the cops. I started learning about old Prohibition-era speakeasy tunnels under the city, for running whiskey.”

— Ann Nocenti

“It's a luxury being able to work every day in the streets of Manhattan. It doesn't get much cooler than that. When you move to New York, that's exactly what you dream of. And I'm doing it.”

— Kelli Giddish

“New York is a much more bourgeois city, more of a tourist attraction than a muscular metropolis. It's lost moxie and a rough energy, while gaining grace and friendliness. I love both versions of the city, but I wish the prosperous Manhattan would become a little easier for young people to afford.”

— Rafael Yglesias

“The thing about New York is, more than any other place I've ever been, you run into people on the street that you would never imagine you'd see, old friends, people just like there for a day or two. I find that all the time when I'm walking around Manhattan, running into people that I had no idea were even there.”

— Michael Shannon

“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

“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

“I was part of that group of kids growing up in the '80s under the Reagan regime, what I used to call 'living in the shadow of Dr. Manhattan,' where we would have dreams all the time that New York City was being destroyed, and that that wall of light and destruction was rolling out and would just devour our neighborhood.”

— Junot Diaz

“I love New York City. Everyone is busy with their own lives - and no one is interested in some Hollywood celebrity walking past in downtown Manhattan.”

— James Van Der Beek

“I remember perfectly my first trip to New York, when I was on the bridge between Brooklyn and Manhattan, when I saw the skyscrapers. It was like an incredible dream.”

— Diego Della Valle

“Ellis Island lies in New York Harbor 1,300 feet from Jersey City, New Jersey, and one mile from the tip of Manhattan. At the time of the first European settlement, it was mostly mud, sand, and oyster shells, which nearly disappeared at high tide.”

— David Souter

“From 1985 to 1994, I lived in Manhattan in a big old loft right off Times Square. I could walk to work, which was in a couple of Broadway theaters, to Howard Stern's studio, and to 30 Rock for 'Letterman' and 'SNL.' Even in New York, walking to work is homey and folksy, like living in a small town.”

— Penn Jillette

“I grew up a little north of New York City and went to high school at Regis, an all-boys tuition-free high school in Manhattan.”

— Phil Klay

“I simply assumed I would bundle up my New York wife with her New York interests, her New York pride, and remove her from her New York parents-leave the frantic, thrilling futureland of Manhattan behind-and transplant her to a little town on the river in Missouri, and all would be fine.”

— Gillian Flynn

“My dad grew up in Washington Heights. I grew up in New York in Manhattan. So we're purebred New Yorkers.”

— Ansel Elgort

“I'm from New York. My grandparents were settlers of Long Island City. When they came here, there was no bridge, and they had to hire a boat across the river. They had a farm, and my grandmother had to go once a week to Manhattan to buy provisions - very primitive.”

— Iris Apfel

“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

“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

“I live in Manhattan but travel all around the world; I moved to Paris when I was 16; I lived in London twice. It's kind of like, if I want to move somewhere, I don't have anything holding me back. I don't have children. If I wanna live in a certain place, I'll go. But I've lived everywhere, and I prefer New York to everything.”

— Jessica White

“I try to remember what it was like to be a kid in New York. I lived in different parts of my childhood in Manhattan on the Upper West Side, where 'When You Reach Me' is set, and also in the Midwood section of Brooklyn.”

— Rebecca Stead

“So much for the recreational side of night life in the upper-bracket-income hotels of Manhattan. And in its root-origins the very word itself is implicit with implication: re-create. Analyze it and you'll see it also means to reproduce. But clever, ingenious Man has managed to sidetrack it into making life more livable.
("New York Blues")”

— Cornell Woolrich

“What people don't think about when they think about New York is this amazing farmland that grows wonderful fruits, vegetables, seafood, game, and fowl just outside of Manhattan.”

— Daniel Humm

“Children were allowed to lie down on the park as it was being moved. This was considered a concession, although no one knew why a concession was necessary, or why it was to children that this concession must be made. The biggest fireworks show in history lit the skies of New York City that night, and the Philarmonic played its heart out.
The children of New York lay on their backs, body to body, filling every inch of the park, as if it had been designed for them and that moment. The fireworks sprinkled down, dissolving in the air just before they reached the ground, and the children were pulled, one millimeter and one second at a time, into Manhattan and adulthood. By the time the park found its current resting place, every single one of the children had fallen asleep, and the park was a mosaic of their dreams. Some hollered out, some smiled unconsciously, some were perfectly still.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

“Fang and I searched in every way we could think of and found a million institutes of one kind or another, in Manhattan and throughout New York state, but none of them seemed promising. My favorite? The Institute for Realizing Your Pet's Inner Potential. Anyone who can explain that to me, drop a line.”

— James Patterson

“And yet there are other days, when I'm downtrodden or morose, when I find myself at my desk late at night, unable to sleep, flipping through (of all things) Oscar's dog-eared copy of Watchmen. One of the few things that he took with him on the Final Voyage that we recovered. The original trade. I flip through the book, one of his top three, without question, to the last horrifying chapter: "A Stronger Loving World." To the only panel he's circled. Oscar-who never defaced a book in his life-circled one panel three times in the same emphatic pen he used to write his last letters home. The panel where Adrian Veidt and Dr. Manhattan are having their last convo. After the mutant brain has destroyed New York City; after Dr. Manhattan has murdered Rorschach; after Veidt's plan has succeded in "saving the world." Veidt says: "I did the right thing, didn't I? It all worked out in the end." And Manhattan, before fading from our Universe, replies: "In”

— Junot Díaz

“I say, they [those at the top] don't have to conspire, because they all think alike. The president of General Motors and the president of Chase Manhattan Bank really are not going to disagree much on anything, nor would the editor of the New York Times disagree with them. They all tend to think quite alike, otherwise they would not be in those jobs.”

— Gore Vidal

“It was generally agreed that a coffin-size studio on Avenue D was preferable to living in one of the boroughs. Moving from one Brooklyn or Staten Island neighborhood to another was fine, but unless you had children to think about, even the homeless saw it as a step down to leave Manhattan. Customers quitting the island for Astoria or Cobble Hill would claim to welcome the change of pace, saying it would be nice to finally have a garden or live a little closer to the airport. They'd put a good face one it, but one could always detect an underlying sense of defeat. The apartments might be bigger and cheaper in other places, but one could never count on their old circle of friend making the long trip to attend a birthday party. Even Washington Heights was considered a stretch. People referred to it as Upstate New York, though it was right there in Manhattan.”

— David Sedaris

“I seem to respond most to places that are more cosmopolitan because of my Manhattan upbringing. Some of the major international cities I've visited, like Madrid, Rome and London, have a lot of similarities and "New York" elements while ... having their own flavor.”

— Bobby Flay

“For me, Woody Allen's 'Manhattan' defines New York. Both New York and Manhattan Island should be in black in white! I always hear the soundtrack of Gershwin in my head every time I go over the Queensboro Bridge, or come in from JFK because of it!”

— Brian Cox

“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

“It seems to me that the sad event of 9/11 has created a huge opportunity for the revitalization of lower Manhattan - new world class contemporary buildings, more open space and pedestrian connections, more sustainability, more culture and the rejuvenation of New York on the world stage again.”

— Paul Goldberger

“I think it was the perfect gestation time for this particular piece [ Sounds Like Me: My Life (So Far) in Song]. One of the songs that I considered talking about was "Manhattan," because it was chronicling the end of a long relationship that was part of the reason why I moved from Los Angeles to New York, which was such a life-changing decision. I don't regret that it's not in there, but that's one that I considered diving into, and I have little piecemeal snippets of writing about that floating around”

— Sara Bareilles

“New York was always more expensive than any other place in the United States, but you could live in New York - and by New York, I mean Manhattan. Brooklyn was the borough of grandparents. We didn't live well. We lived in these horrible places. But you could live in New York. And you didn't have to think about money every second.”

— Fran Lebowitz

“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

“He who touches the soil of Manhattan and the pavement of New York, touches, whenever he knows or not, Walt Whitman.”

— Lewis Mumford

“It seems to me that you are better off, as a writer and as an American, in a small town than you'd be in New York. I thoroughly detest New York, though I have to go there very often ... Have you ever noticed that no American writer of any consequence lives in Manhattan? Dreiser tried it (after many years in the Bronx), but finally moved to California.”

— H.L. Mencken

“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

“Actually, New York is great for playing around. I made a lot of studies for New York-a big vacuum cleaner lying on the Battery in Manhattan.”

— Claes Oldenburg

“I wish my parents had raised me in Manhattan because I think it's the greatest thing you can do for a kid is to raise them in New York City. I can see this with my own children.”

— Woody Allen

“For most visitors to Manhattan, both foreign and domestic, New York is the Shrine of the Good Time. "I don't see how you stand it," they often say to the native New Yorker who has been sitting up past his bedtime for a week in an attempt to tire his guest out. "It's all right for a week or so, but give me the little old home town when it comes to living." And, under his breath, the New Yorker endorses the transfer and wonders himself how he stands it.”

— Robert Benchley

“After 9/11, I was like many people in New York City and got a little depressed. I began to check myself into The Waldorf Astoria for room service, movies and just to chill. I wanted to contribute to the great city of Manhattan.”

— Kristin Chenoweth