Indeed Heckewelder claims that the name Manhattan is derived from the drunkenness that took place there, since the Indian word ‘manahactanienk’ means ‘the island of general intoxication’.

 – Giles Milton

I remember being stunned at the New York skyline as I drove over this big freeway, coming across the flats in Seacaucus. All of a sudden it was looming up in front of me and I almost lost control of the car. I thought it was a vision.

 – Hunter S. Thompson

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

The glamour of it all! New York! America!

 – Charlie Chaplin

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

 – Le Corbusier

And New York is the most beautiful city in the world? It is not far from it. No urban night is like the night there…. Squares after squares of flame, set up and cut into the aether. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will.

 – Ezra Pound

Whoever is born in New York is ill-equipped to deal with any other city: all other cities seem, at best, a mistake, and, at worst, a fraud. No other city is so spitefully incoherent.

 – James Baldwin

A middle finger is more New York than a corporate ambush. I bleed for my hometown, and I’d die for my fans.

 – Lady Gaga

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

 – Lewis Mumford

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

Cut off as I am, it is inevitable that I should sometimes feel like a shadow walking in a shadowy world. When this happens I ask to be taken to New York City. Always I return home weary but I have the comforting certainty that mankind is real flesh and I myself am not a dream.

 – Helen Keller

It’s a city where everybody mutinies but no one deserts.

 – Harry Hershfield

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

If man can live in Manhattan, he can live anywhere.

 – Arthur C. Clarke

Manhattan can act as a giant suction cup, sucking you into its folds. The city breeds no wimps and makes no apologies.

 – Kate Rockland

In a single block you could buy fertility statues from Tanzania, rare Amazonian orchids, a pawned brass tuba, Krispy Kreme doughnuts, or the best, most expensive cup of coffee you ever tasted.

 – Francine Pascal

My favorite thing about New York is the people, because I think they’re misunderstood. I don’t think people realize how kind New York people are.

 – Bill Murray

For me, New York is comfortable, not strange.

 – Karl Lagerfeld

There is no place like it, no place with an atom of its glory, pride, and exultancy. It lays its hand upon a man’s bowels; he grows drunk with ecstasy; he grows young and full of glory, he feels that he can never die.

 – Walt Whitman

New York is a sucked orange.

 – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Make your mark in New York and you are a made man.

 – Mark Twain

I believe in New Yorkers. Whether they’ve ever questioned the dream in which they live, I wouldn’t know, because I won’t ever dare ask that question.

 – Dylan Thomas

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

If London is a watercolor, New York is an oil painting.

 – Peter Shaffer

Skyscraper National Park.

 – Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

While America will always, I think, feel foreign to me, New York City is my home. This is where I can construct my own identity freely and reject labels imposed on me.

 – Raquel Cepeda

You haven’t lived until you died in New York.

 – Alexander Woollcott

New York is large, glamorous, easy-going, kindly and incurious, but above all it is a crucible – because it is large enough to be incurious.

 – Ford Madox Ford

New York!” he said. “That’s not a place, it’s a dream.

 – Ralph Ellison

Every great wave of popular passion that rolls up on the prairies is dashed to spray when it strikes the hard rocks of Manhattan.

 – H.L. Mencken

It can destroy an individual, or it can fulfill him, depending a good deal on luck. No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky.

 – E.B. White

New York, the nation’s thyroid gland.

 – Christopher Morley

Manhattan in the morning is a living stream of Purpose; everyone’s got a place to be and a problem on their mind.

 – Laura Anne Gilman

Mickey Mouse popped out of my mind onto a drawing pad 20 years ago on a train ride from Manhattan to Hollywood at a time when business fortunes of my brother Roy and myself were at lowest ebb and disaster seemed right around the corner.

 – Walt Disney

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.

 – Amy Poehler

When you leave New York, you are astonished at how clean the rest of the world is. Clean is not enough.

 – Fran Lebowitz

In New York you’ve got to have all the luck.

 – Charles Bukowski

It is often said that New York is a city for only the very rich and the very poor. It is less often said that New York is also, at least for those of us who came there from somewhere else, a city for only the very young.

 – Joan Didion

I regret profoundly that I was not an American and not born in Greenwich Village. It might be dying, and there might be a lot of dirt in the air you breathe, but this is where it’s happening.

 – John Lennon

The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and beauty in the world.

 – F. Scott Fitzgerald

The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.

 – John Updike

People go to LA to “find themselves”, they come to New York to become someone new.

 – Lindsey Kelk

New York City is where specks of dust aspire randomly with all their cunning to become grains of sand.

 – David B. Lentz

Sometimes to walk in shaded parts of Manhattan is to be inserted into a Magritte: the street is night while the sky is day.

 – Joseph O’Neill

Every true New Yorker believes with all his heart that when a New Yorker is tired of New York, he is tired of life.

 – Robert Moses

New York, of course, is to be in endless surreal situations where a fifty-thousand dollar, gun-metal Mercedez pulls up into a puddle of blood, and out steps a twenty-five karat blonde transvestite with a two dollar wristwatch.

 – Tom Waits

New York lesson 1 – never look lost. Lesson 2 – forget hallowed silences. It’s the right of all Americans to talk at the tops of their voices.”

 – Alison Fell