50 Best New York Quotes to Inspire Your Next Trip to NYC

“I love that about New York: You just dress the way you want to dress and feel really comfortable because nobody is judging. You can just be yourself, and it’s perfectly normal.”

Henrik Lundquist

“I look out the window and I see the lights and the skyline and the people on the street rushing around looking for action, love, and the world’s greatest chocolate chip cookie, and my heart does a little dance.”

Nora Ephron

“In order to love New York you have to hate it too. It’s like a love affair–you don’t hunger for it till it’s out of reach, and when you’ve had your fill, you need to separate. When you return, some of its unfamiliar, but oh my god, the beauty of it.”

Connie Eisenstat

“One can’t paint New York as it is, but rather as it is felt.”

Georgia O’Keefe

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

Mark Twain

“When you leave New York you ain’t going anywhere.”

Jimmy Breslin

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

Le Corbusier

“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

“It was never built for the comfort and happiness of its citizens, but to astonish the world.”

Susan Ertz

“New York is really the place to be; to go to New York, you’re going to the center of the world, the lion’s den.”

Zubin Mehta

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

Lindsey Kelk

“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

“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

“New York has a trip-hammer vitality which drives you insane with restlessness, if you have no inner stabilizer…. In New York I have always felt lonely, the loneliness of the caged animal, which brings on crime, sex, alcohol and other madnesses.”

Henry Miller

“As only New Yorkers know, if you can get through the twilight, you’ll live through the night.”

Dorothy Parker

“You could grow up in the city where history was made and still miss it all”

Jonathan Lethem

“Once you have lived in New York and it has become your home, no place else is good enough.”

John Steinbeck

“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.”

Thomas Wolfe

“This is the city of dreamers and time and again it’s the place where the greatest dream of all, the American dream, has been tested and has triumphed.”

Michael Bloomberg

“As for New York City, it is a place apart. There is not its match in any other country in the world.”

Pearl S. Buck

“Quite simply, I was in love with New York. I do not mean ‘love’ in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and you never love anyone quite that way again.”

Joan Didion

“You haven’t lived until you died in New York”

Alexander Woollcott

“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

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

“So I went to New York City to be born again. It was and remains easy for most Americans to go somewhere else and start anew. I wasn’t like my parents. I didn’t have any supposedly sacred piece of land or shoals of friends to leave behind. Nowhere has the number zero been of more philosophical value than in the United States…. and when the [train] plunged into a tunnel under New York City, with its lining of pipes and wires, I was out of the womb and into the birth canal.”

Kurt Vonnegut

“By comparison with other less hectic days, the city is uncomfortable and inconvenient; but New Yorkers temperamentally do not crave comfort and convenience—if they did they would live elsewhere.”

E.B. White

‘The glamour of it all! New York! America!’ –

Charlie Chaplin