“It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York.”— Sylvia Plath, amazon.com
“The playback: late night, Brooklyn, a pot of coffee, and a chair by the window.”— Rob Sheffield, amazon.com
“Lou Levy, top man of Leeds Music Publishing company, took me up in a taxi to the Pythian Temple on West 70th Street to show me the pocket sized recording studio where Bill Haley and His Comets had recorded 'Rock Around the Clock'—then down to Jack Dempsey's restaurant on 58th and Broadway, where we…”— Bob Dylan, amazon.com
“That was the morning I committed the first sin of love, which was to confuse beauty and a good sound track with knowledge.”— Stephanie Danler, amazon.com
“We all walk in a cloud of mourning for the New York that just disappeared.”— Stephanie Danler, amazon.com
“It was becoming somewhat more difficult, too, to open a ‘public house’ or tavern for the sale of liquor. Municipal authorities now requested applicants for a license to present a certificate attesting they were ‘of good life & Conversation and fit to keep such a house.”— Edwin G. Burrows, amazon.com
“It's hard to overstate the amount of envy and pettiness that fuels New York City.”— Harry Evans, hollywoodreporter.com
“A common advertising campaign strategy, especially in subway and bus ads, seems to involve trading on New Yorkers’ mythic negativity by reminding them what curmudgeons they still are. 'New Yorkers love us and they hate everything,' an ad for Oscar health insurance says. 'Over eight million people in…”— Meghan Daum, nytimes.com
“New York was populated by the ambitious. It was often the only thing that everyone here had in common.”— Hanya Yanagihara, amazon.com
“I breathed in the night air that was or was not laced with anachronistic blossoms and felt the small thrill I always felt to a lesser or greater degree when I looked at Manhattan's skyline and the innumerable illuminated windows and the liquid sapphire and ruby of traffic on the FDR Drive and the pr…”— Ben Lerner, sagasgas
“I bought a bicycle and pedaled all over town, trying to connect with the real New York City. But no matter how much time I spent in Central Park, to me living in the city felt like living indoors. I needed to be someplace where I could feel a strong connection to the earth.”— Phil Jackson, amazon.com
“New York is a peninsula and Manhattan is an island and it doesn't belong to America — it is a continent by itself in a sense. That is why we are comfortable in New York; it is very European in one sense and very American in another and so it feels comfortable for an ex-patriot. But when you are in C…”— Massimo Vignelli, amazon.com