Alice > Alice's Quotes

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

“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, America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction

“If London is a watercolor, New York is an oil painting.”
― Peter Shaffer

“One belongs to New York instantly, one belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years.”
― Tom Wolfe

“New York was a city where you could be frozen to death in the midst of a busy street and nobody would notice.”
― Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Volume One

“It is necessary to find one's own way in New York. New York City is not hospitable. She is very big and she has no heart. She is not charming. She is not sympathetic. She is rushed and noisy and unkempt, a hard, ambitious, irresolute place, not very lively, and never gay. When she glitters she is very, very bright, and when she does not glitter she is dirty. New York does nothing for those of us who are inclined to love her except implant in our hearts a homesickness that baffles us until we go away from her, and then we realize why we are restless. At home or away, we are homesick for New York not because New York used to be better and not because she used to be worse but because the city holds us and we don't know why.”
― Maeve Brennan

“Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book -and does”
― Groucho Marx

“One of the highlights of the first Good Omens tour was Neil and I walking through New York singing Shoehorn with Teeth. Well, we'd had a good breakfast. And you don't get mugged, either.”
― Terry Pratchett, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“One of those out-of-the-ordinary days that made sense of the slew of ordinary days. New York had a way of doing that. Every now and then the city shook its soul out. It assailed you with an image, or a day, or a crime, or a terror, or a beauty so difficult to wrap your mind around that you had to shake your head in disbelief.

He had a theory about it. It happened, and re-happened, because it was a city uninterested in history. Strange things occurred precisely because there was no necessary regard for the past. The city lived in a sort of everyday present. It had no need to believe in itself as a London, or an Athens, or even a signifier of the New World, like a Sydney, or a Los Angeles. No, the city couldn’t care less about where it stood. He had seen a T-shirt once that said: NEW YORK FUCKIN’ CITY. As if it were the only place that ever existed and the only one that ever would.

New York kept going forward precisely because it didn’t give a good goddamn about what it had left behind. It was like the city that Lot left, and it would dissolve if it ever began looking backward over its own shoulder. Two pillars of salt. Long Island and New Jersey.”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

“I once saw a snake having sex with a vulture, and I thought, It’s just business as usual in Washington DC.”
― Jarod Kintz, The Days of Yay are Here! Wake Me Up When They're Over.

“To be surrounded by sixty people who make your life miserable is to be at a family reunion. But to be surrounded by 600,000 people who make the whole world miserable is to live in Washington DC.”
― Jarod Kintz, At even one penny, this book would be overpriced. In fact, free is too expensive, because you'd still waste time by reading it.

“A short distance away is the Tidal Basin, ringed by cherry trees that every year produce flowers, an event to which Washingtonians react as though it were the Second Coming of Christ.”
― Dave Barry, Dave Barry Hits Below the Beltway

“I mean it," I said. "You're in danger."

"Relax, Harry. I'm not letting anyone lick me, and I'm not looking anyone in the eyes. It's kind of like visiting New York.”
― Jim Butcher, Grave Peril

“You could grow up in the city where history was made and still miss it all.”
― Jonathan Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude

“Brooklyn was like Philadelphia made better by its proximity to Manhattan.”
― Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections

“There is something in the New York air that makes sleep useless.”
― Simone de Beauvoir

“Sometimes, from beyond the skycrapers, the cry of a tugboat finds you in your insomnia, and you remember that this desert of iron and cement is an island.”
― Albert Camus

“When you leave New York you ain't going anywhere.”
― Jimmy Breslin

“Guys like you can't escape the city. Hell, you a got a blood contract with this place. You're married to the old girl.”
― Mickey Spillane, Kiss Her Goodbye

“I carry the place around the world in my heart but sometimes I try to shake it off in my dreams”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“What, indeed, is a New Yorker? Is he Jew or Irish? Is he English or German? Is he Russian or Polish? He may be something of all these, and yet he is wholly none of them. Something has been added to him which he had not had before. he is endowed with a briskness and an invention often alien to his blood. He is quicker in his movement, less trammeled in his judgement...The change he undergoes is unmistakeable, New York, indeed, resembles a magic cauldron. Those who are cast into it are born again.”
― Charles Whibley, American Sketches

“Central Park is the grandiose symbol of the front yard each child in New York hasn't got.”
― Robert Benchley

“There is more sophistication and less sense in New York than anywhere else on the globe.”
― Elbert Hubbard

“True New Yorkers do not really seek information about the outside world. They feel that if anything is not in New York it is not likely to be interesting.”
― Jimmy Breslin

“New York is the only city in the world where you can get run down on the sidewalk by a pedestrian.”
― Russell Baker

“The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn't require any.”
― Russell Baker

“Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it.”
― Russell Baker

“It's a city where everbody mutinies but no one deserts.”
― Harry Hershfield

“Manhattan is an accumulation of possible disasters that never happen.”
― Ed Koch

“The whole of New York is rebuilt about once in ten years.”
― Philip Hone