New York is not a problem. New York is a stroke of genius.

New York!

Concrete jungle where dreams are made of,
There's nothing you can’t do,
Now you're in New York!!!
These streets will make you feel brand new,
the lights will inspire you,
Let's hear it for New York, New York, New York.

- Jay-Z and Alicia Keys

Carrie: There are very few things this New Yorker loves as much as Sunday brunch. You can sleep until noon and still get eggs anywhere in the city, alcohol is often included with the meal, and Sunday is the one day a week you get the single woman's sports pages: the New York Times wedding section.

– from Sex and the City

It's the home of 9-11, the place of the lost towers
We still banging, we never lost power, tell em
Welcome to New York City, welcome to New York City.

- Cam’Ron (with Jay-Z and Juelz Santana)

Carrie: If your tired of New York you take a napa, you don't move to Napa!

- from Sex and the City

Some folks like to get away

Take a holiday from the neighbourhood
Hop a flight to Miami Beach
Or to Hollywood
But I'm taking a Greyhound
On the Hudson River Line
I'm in a New York state of mind.


I've seen all the movie stars
In their fancy cars and their limousines
Been high in the Rockies under the evergreens
But I know what I'm needing
And I don't want to waste more time
I'm in a New York state of mind.


It was so easy living day by day
Out of touch with the rhythm and blues
But now I need a little give and take
The New York Times, The Daily News.


It comes down to reality
And it's fine with me 'cause I've let it slide
Don't care if it's Chinatown or on Riverside
I don't have any reasons
I've left them all behind
I'm in a New York state of mind.

- Billy Joel

Samantha to Carrie: Oh don't worry, Sweetie, don't worry -- nobody in New York notices a bus until it's about to hit them.

– from Sex and the City

Water, water, everywhere, Atlantic and Pacific.
But New York City's got them beat, Our aqua is terrific!


- Edward Koch

Overheard in NYC:

Tourist lady: Everyone has been so nice in New York; not what I expected.


Woman: We are nice, just self-absorbed.

New Yorkers say “excuse me” as a command.

- Attributed to more than one person

In a New York minute

Everything can change;
In a New York minute
You can get out of the rain.
In a New York minute
Everything can change
In a New York minute.

- The Eagles

It is a miracle that New York works at all. The whole thing is implausible.

- E.B. White

At night… the streets become rhythmical perspectives of glowing dotted lines, reflections hung upon them in the streets as the wistaria hangs its violet racemes on its trellis. The buildings are shimmering verticality, a gossamer veil, a festive scene-prop hanging there against the black sky to dazzle, entertain, amaze.

- Frank Lloyd Wright

The more I travel, across the gravel,

The more I sail the sea,
The more I feel convinced to the fact,
New York's the town for me.


That crazy skyline
Is right in my line,
And when I'm far away,
I'm able to bear it for several hours
Then I break down and say:


Take me back to Manhattan,
Take me back to New York.
I'm just longing to see once more
My little home on the hundredth floor!
Can you wonder I'm gloomy?
Can you smile when I frown?
I miss the East Side, the West Side ,
the north side, and the south side.
So take me back to Manhattan,
That dear old dirty town!

- Cole Porter

More and more too, the old name absorbs into me Mannahatta, 'the place encircled by many swift tides and sparkling waters.' How fit a name for America's great democratic island city! The word itself, how beautiful! how aboriginal! how it seems to rise with tall spires, glistening in sunshine, with such New World atmosphere, vista and action!

- Walt Whitman

What a lovely view from
Heaven looks at you from the Brooklyn Bridge. 

- Frank Sinatra

When its 100 degrees in New York, it's 72 in Los Angeles. When its 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

It'll be a great place if they ever finish it.

- O. Henry

You don't have to be born in New York City to be a New Yorker. You have to live here for six months, and if at the end of the six months you find you walk faster, talk faster, think faster, you're a New Yorker.

- Ed Koch

New York remains what it has always been : a city of ebb and flow, a city of constant shifts of population and economics, a city of virtually no rest. It is harsh, dirty, and dangerous, it is whimsical and fanciful, it is beautiful and soaring - it is not one or another of these things but all of them, all at once, and to fail to accept this paradox is to deny the reality of city existence.

- Paul Goldberger

I'm going to show you the real New York - witty, smart, and international - like any metropolis. Tell me this: where in Europe can you find old Hungary, old Russia, old France, old Italy? In Europe you're trying to copy America, you're almost American. But here you'll find Europeans who immigrated a hundred years ago - and we haven't spoiled them. Oh, Gio! You must see why I love New York. Because the whole world's in New York….

- Oriana Fallaci

There is something in the New York air that makes sleep useless.

- Simone De Beauvoir

First New York was a sort of provincial capital, bigger and richer than Manchester or Marseilles, but not much different in its essential spirit. Then, after the war, it became one among half a dozen world cities. Today it has the appearance of standing alone, as the center of culture in the part of the world that still tries to be civilized.

- Malcolm Cowley

New York is the only real city-city.

- Truman Capote

As for New York City, it is a place apart. There is not its match in any other country in the world.

- Pearl S. Buck

Roaming the streets of New York, we encountered many examples of this delightful quality of New Yorkers, forever on their toes, violently, restlessly involving themselves in the slightest situation brought to their attention, always posing alternatives, always ready with an answer or an argument.

- Jessica Mitford

A hundred times have I thought New York is a catastrophe, and fifty times: It is a beautiful catastrophe.

- Le Corbusier