New York City

The last time anybody made a list of the top hundred character attributes of New Yorkers, common sense snuck in at number 79.

— New York City

New York is the only city in the world where you can get deliberately run down on the sidewalk by a pedestrian.

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Everybody ought to have a lower East Side in their life.

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You know what’s great about New York? The threshold for citizenship as a New Yorker is actually pretty short. If you come to New York and you still like it two years after you arrived here, and you still think it’s great and you’re having a good time and you haven’t been just totally ground down and go limping back to wherever the fuck you came from, you know what? You’re in!

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I can't see heaven but I credit hell — I live in New York so I know it well.

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Manhattan. Sometimes from beyond the skyscrapers, across thousands of high walls, the fearful cry of a too-well-known voice finds you in your insomnia in the middle of the night, and you remember that this desert of iron and cement is an island of un-reality.

— New York City

New York is the only real city-city.

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Of course, in Los Angeles, everything is based on driving, even the killings. In New York, most people don't have cars, so if you want to kill a person, you have to take the subway to their house. And sometimes on the way, the train is delayed and you get impatient, so you have to kill someone on the subway. That's why there are so many subway murders; no one has a car.

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Donald Trump has been uncommonly nice to Hillary and me. We're all New Yorkers. And I like him. And I love playing golf with him.

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New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and the perishable dream itself. To think of 'living' there was to reduce the miraculous to the mundane; one does not 'live' at Xanadu.

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This is New York. We'll find a place to dance.

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New York: where everyone mutinies but no one deserts.

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I used to love to call L.A. when I lived in New York. "What're y'all doin'? Talkin' to TV producers, huh? Bummer. Me? I'm readin' a book! Yeah, we're thinkin' back East! Yeah, we're evolving. Is that "The Big One" I hear in the background? Bye, you lizard scum, bye!

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New York is appalling, fantastically charmless and elaborately dire.

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The only reason I wouldn't go to some parts of New York is the real risk of meeting Donald Trump.

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“They want to see our skyscrapers destroyed because they are envious of them,” Mr. Koch said in a phone interview. Asked whom he was referring to, he said, “‘They’ is the rest of the country.”

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Leave us alone, or else expect us in New York and Washington.\t

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

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

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New York now leads the world's great cities in the number of people around whom you shouldn't make a sudden move.

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Traffic signals in New York are just rough guidelines.

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You're not from New York, are you? You can't be from New York. Well, when I broke in, I didn't know many people by name so I would just say, "Say, hey," and the writers picked that up. The writers here in New York can make anything happen, so they made that happen.

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New York: A third-rate Babylon.

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In New York you can be a new man.

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New York arguably boasts the most diverse population of any major city in the world because of the flow of immigrants from across the globe.

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Futurist thinkers have rarely been kind to New York City. In fact, writers and artists have spent the better part of two centuries destroying the Big Apple. Whether by flood or fire, nuclear explosion or alien invasion, New York more than any other city bears the brunt of our most apocalyptic futures.

— New York City

It came to be the symbol of the city — not just the American city, but the city itself — with skyscrapers in the early 20th century. It remains the most important American city despite the rise of Chicago at one point, and Los Angeles and D.C. At least for economics and for culture, New York is still the capital and has been, really from the 1830s onward.

— New York City

The best thing for New York might be the sight of King Kong tramping through the streets of Manhattan on his way to a fateful appointment at the top of the Empire State Building,” Mr. Page wrote. “For if there is one thing that symbolizes New York’s pre-eminence, it is that so many still want to imagine the city’s end.

— New York City

They're building armoured skyscrapers in New York, every flat costs 100 billions euros. We're going towards a new middle-age: there'll be fortresses with rich chinese, russians, indians, arabians, americans inside, while the rest of the world will live in a new dark age.

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Living in California adds ten years to a man's life. And those extra ten years I'd like to spent in New York.

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New York is a woman, holding, according to history, a rag called liberty with one hand, and strangling the earth with the other.

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When its 100 degrees in New York, its 78 in Los Angeles. When its 10 degrees in New York, its 78 in Los Angeles. There are two million interesting people in New York. There are 78 in Los Angeles.

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Visitors to places like New York are amazed to see the way in which Serbs and Croatians, Sikhs and Hindus, Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants, Jews and Palestinians, all seem to work and live together in harmony. How is this possible when these same groups are spearing each other and burning each other's homes in so many places in the world?

— New York City

The American Indians sold Manhattan to the Dutch for $700 in today's money. My point is, that's what Manhattan was worth then. It was useless, it was just a piece of land, like any other piece of land which you can buy today for $700 in many places in the world. Manhattan today is the result of the people who built it, not the original inhabitants who occupied or sold it.

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Sometimes I get bored riding down the beautiful streets of L.A. I know it sounds crazy, but I just want to go to New York and see people suffer.

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City of prose and fantasy, of capitalist automatism, its streets a triumph of cubism, its moral philosophy that of the dollar. New York impressed me tremendously because, more than any other city, it is the fullest expression of our modern age.

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

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No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky.

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New York blazes like a magnificent jewel in its fit setting of sea, and earth, and stars.

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One belongs to New York instantly, one belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years.

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In New York the opportunities for learning, and acquiring a culture that shall not come out of the ruins, but belong to life, are probably greater than anywhere else in the world.

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New York is symbolic for the pride of mankind.

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Stream of the living worldFor the ships of all the earth!

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Silent, grim, colossal, the Big City has ever stood against its revilers. They call it hard as iron; they say that nothing of pity beats in its bosom; they compare its streets with lonely forests and deserts of lava. But beneath the hard crust of the lobster is found a delectable and luscious food. Perhaps a different simile would have been wiser. Still nobody should take offence. We would call nobody a lobster with good and sufficient claws.

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New York is the Caoutchouc City. * * * They have the furor rubberendi.

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In dress, habits, manners, provincialism, routine and narrowness, he acquired that charming insolence, that irritating completeness, that sophisticated crassness, that overbalanced poise that makes the Manhattan gentleman so delightfully small in his greatness.

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Well, little old Noisyville-on-the-Subway is good enough for me * * * Me for it from the rathskellers up. Sixth Avenue is the West now to me.

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If there ever was an aviary overstocked with jays it is that Yaptown-on-the-Hudson, called New York. Cosmopolitan they call it, you bet. So's a piece of fly-paper. You listen close when they're buzzing and trying to pull their feet out of the sticky stuff. "Little old New York's good enough for us"—that's what they sing.

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You'd think New York people was all wise; but no, they can't get a chance to learn. Every thing's too compressed. Even the hayseeds are bailed hayseeds. But what else can you expect from a town that's shut off from the world by the ocean on one side and New Jersey on the other?

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Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,Mother of exiles.

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Some day this old Broadway shall climb to the skies,That is climbed by the rainbow-clad spirits of prayer.

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Up in the heights of the evening skies I see my City of Cities floatO gazing, how the heart is lost in the Deepest City in the World.

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Just where the Treasury's marble frontFrom Trinity's undaunted steeple.

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Lo! body and soul!—this land!And ever the far-spreading prairies, covered with grass and corn.

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Cause when you leave New York New York's my home, sweet home

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I run New York. Yayo tell them, I run New York.

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You're fucking with a dirty New Yorker. Queens in this bitch, fall back or get roped up.

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In New York, concrete jungle where dreams are made, ohNew York, New York.

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But we're hunters; we take pride in airing our prey out. Leaving them laid out, dead, in just a sport. Because we aren't playing up here in New York.

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One hand in the air for the big city Everybody say "yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah"

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'Cause everyone's my friend in New York CityBut the best thing about New York City is you and me.

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She is a rock She's the greatest town that you'll ever find, yeah!

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She is my heart But she is fine, she always survives, yeah!

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New York, I love you. But, you're bringing me down. Like a rat in a cage, pulling minimum wage.

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In New York freedom looks like too many choicesIn New York, just got a place in New York

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I had seven facesNew York Cares (got to be some more change in my life)

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Me, I'm takin' a GreyhoundI'm in a New York State of Mind

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It's easier to leave than to be left behindYou find it in your heart, change...

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Why do we still live hereAll our friends are in New York

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New York, New York, a helluva town. The Bronx is up but the 's down.

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