The Most Famous Quotes about New York City

Fabulous New York always has been inspiring people to create amazing works of art: pictures, songs, novels, poems, photos, films, theater performances, and of course a lot of quotes. Some of the are famous all over the world

Here you’ll find writers, historians, architects, playwrights, critics and celebrities who, traveling through the streets of New York, once paused to paint their own New York in its bright colors – and dark shadows.

Quotes about New York

• “Concrete Jungle where dreams are made of, there’s nothing you can’t do.” – Jay-Z
• “I love New York City. The reason I live in New York City is because it’s the loudest city on the planet Earth. It’s so loud I never have to listen to any of the shit that’s going on in my own head. It’s really loud. They literally have guys come with jackhammers and they drill the streets and just leave cones in front of your apartment; you don’t even know why. Garbage men come; they don’t pick up the garbage, they just bang the cans together.” – Lewis Black
• “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
• “Make your mark in New York and you are a made man.” – Mark Twain
• “In New York, you’ve got to have all the luck.” – Charles Bukowski
• “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
• “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
• “In terms of theater, there’s not a more supportive theater community than in New York. It’s really kind of a real thrill to go there. I mean, don’t forget, I’m a boy from the suburbs of Sydney, so getting to New York is a huge, huge thrill.” – Hugh Jackman
• “The glamour of it all! New York! America!” – Charlie Chaplin
• “I go to Paris, I go to London, I go to Rome, and I always say, “There’s no place like New York. It’s the most exciting city in the world now. That’s the way it is. That’s it.”” – Robert De Niro
• “One’s life and passion may be elsewhere, but New York is where you prove if what you think in theory makes sense in life.” – Miuccia Prada
• “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
• “I can’t with any conscience argue for New York with anyone. It’s like Calcutta. But I love the city in an emotional, irrational way, like loving your mother or your father even though they’re a drunk or a thief. I’ve loved the city my whole life — to me, it’s like a great woman.” – Woody Allen
• “Over the great bridge, with sunlight through the girders making a constant flicker upon the moving cars, with the city rising up across the river in white heaps and sugar lumps all built with a wish out of non-olfactory money. The city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald
• “I carry the place around the world the world in my heart but sometimes I try to shake it off in my dreams.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald
• “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
• “No one as yet has approached the management of New York in a proper spirit; that is to say, regarding it as the shiftless outcome of squalid barbarism and reckless extravagance. No one is likely to do so, because reflections on the long narrow pig-trough are construed as malevolent attacks against the spirit and majesty of the American people, and lead to angry comparisons.” – Rudyard Kipling
• “I have been roaming far and wide over this island of Manhattan… the city is thronged with strangers, and everything wears an aspect of intense life. Business has experienced a thorough revival, and “all goes merry as a marriage bell.” Notwithstanding the Croton water, or “the Crot’n”, as the Gothamites have it, the streets are, with rare exception, insufferably dirty. The exceptions are to be found in Bond Street, Waverly Place, and some others of the upper, more retired, and more fashionable quarters…” – Edgar Allan Poe
• “If you want to become a real New Yorker, there’s only one rule: You have to believe New York is, has been, and always will be the greatest city on earth. The center of the universe.” – Ellen R. Shapiro