New York quotes
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"Many years from now when your children ask what New York City was like just after 9/11, this will be the book you give them in response. It's an exquisite novel full of heart, soul, passion and intelligence, and it's the one this great New York author was born to write."
"I'm Machiavelli's offspring, I'm the king of New York, king of the coast, one hand, I juggle them both."
"My piece in One World or None was the description of the effect of a single atomic bomb on New York City."
"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."
"I think you can tell when a New York show isn't shot in the city. It's so iconic and has such a specific energy."
"I don't like to see things on purpose. I like them to soak in. A friend . . . asked me to go to the top of the Empire State Building once, and I told him that he shouldn't treat New York as a sight-it's feeling, an emotional experience. And the same with every place else."
"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 the beauty in the world."
"At the New York Athletic Club they serve amazing food. People go there, get healthy, and then eat themselves to death - which is, I suppose, the right way to do it."
"I asked inmate in New York, Warden Fay at that time if, if it didn't make a better inmate out of the Negroes who accepted it and he said, "Yes." So I asked him then what was it about it that he considered to be so danger, and he, dangerous, and he pointed out that it was the cohesiveness that it produced among the inmates. They stuck together."
"New York is not Mecca. It just smells like it."
"New York is the biggest mouth in the world. It appears to be prime example of the herd instinct, leading the universal urban conspiracy to beguile man from his birthright (the good ground), to hang him by his eyebrows from skyhooks above hard pavement, to crucify him, sell him, or be sold by him."
"New York may be the city that never sleeps, but Shanghai doesn't even sit down, and not just because there is no room."
"I am just coming out of five years of night, and this orgy of violent lights gives me for the first time the impression of a new continent. An enormous, 50-foot high Camel billboard : a GI with his mouth wide open blows enormous puffs of real smoke. So much bad taste hardly seems imaginable."
"I travel 250 days a year. There are chef friends who I only see every couple of years. By conventional standards I'm a bad friend. I'm not there to remember your birthday or to offer you words of support through Twitter. I'm not up on what you're doing in New York because I'm not in New York. I'm not what people call in parenting circles "present.""
"There is no question that there is an unseen world. The problem is, how far is it from midtown and how late is it open?"
"I'm always looking for ways to connect myself with American people and that American feeling. I'm trying to pick up on the feeling of places, like the Los Angeles feeling or the New York feeling... Los Angeles is much better for me that way."
"New York is the last true city."
"I was talking to my friend from New York yesterday, and I used the expression, 'You can't polish a turd'. He looked at me, disgusted, and said, 'No, you can't, but you can roll it in glitter'. He's a lovely guy but I wouldn't want to go to a craft fair with him"
"When you leave New York, you are astonished at how clean the rest of the world is. Clean is not enough."
"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."
