New York quotes
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"Ideas matter in New York. I am certain that more conversations in New York are about ideas than anywhere else. Not just vague theories, but ideas that New Yorkers have the will, and the clout, to do something about."
"London is satisfied, Paris is resigned, but New York is always hopeful. Always it believes that something good is about to come off, and it must hurry to meet it."
"When we got off the streetcar at Times Square, it was somewhat of a letdown. Newspapers were blowing about the road and pavement, and Broadway looked seedy, like a slovenly woman just out of bed."
"The glamour of it all! New York! America!"
"What's more important than who's going to be the first black manager is who's going to be the first black sports editor of the New York Times."
"I miss the animal buoyancy of New York, the animal vitality. I did not mind that it had no meaning and no depth."
"I’m going to kill myself. I should go to Paris and jump off the Eiffel Tower. I’ll be dead. you know, in fact, if I get the Concorde, I could be dead three hours earlier, which would be perfect. Or wait a minute. It -- with the time change, I could be alive for six hours in New York but dead three hours in Paris. I could get things done, and I could also be dead."
"Cities give us collision. 'Tis said, London and New York take the nonsense out of a man."
"If thou fill thy brain with Boston and New York, with fashion and covetousness, and wilt stimulate thy jaded senses with wine and French coffee, thou shalt find no radiance of wisdom in the lonely waste of the pinewoods."
"New York is just New York. It's a hard city, it's a hard city to live in. It's a desperate city. It's filled with scam artists and people who are always looking for a way in and a way out and the majority of people have to really negotiate their way through that jungle to get to the other side; the other side being a place of tranquility and peace and home and safety."
"New York, like London, seems to be a cloacina [toilet] of all the depravities of human nature."
"I didn't know what I was doing in New York."
"I never had intimate friends, and the few who came close are in New York. By which I mean they're dead, because that's where I suppose condemned souls go in order not to endure the truth of their past lives."
"When I first moved to New York I wanted to be a dancer, I danced professionally for years, living a hand-to-mouth existence."
"When I came to New York it was the first time I'd ever taken a plane, the first time I'd ever gotten a taxi-cab, the first time for everything. And I came here with 35 dollars in my pocket. It was the bravest thing I'd ever done."
"When I got to New York City when I was 18, I started playing in clubs in Brooklyn - I have good friends and devoted fans on the underground scene, but we were playing for each other at that point - and that was it."
"I lay puzzle as I backtrack to earlier times, Nothing's equivalent to the New York state of mind"
"I could turn around as Wyatt Walker said to me about, not you personally, but about the whole Black Muslim movement. That if you go outside of New York City, Dr. [Martin Luther] King is known to 90 percent of the Negroes in the United States and is respected and, and is identified more or less with him, at least as a hero of one kind or another. That the Black Muslim, outside of one or two communities like New York, are unknown."
"If there were, say, only 10 percent of the hotels that exist now, there would be all these apartments for people who live in New York, as opposed to people visiting New York. And then all this junk in the theater, we would no longer need the kind of stuff that tourists like."
"Books are special, books are the way we talk to generations that have not turned up yet. The fact that we can actually, essentially communicate with the people in ancient Egypt, people in Rome and Greece, people in ancient Britain, people in New York in the 1920s who can communicate to us and change the way we think, and change the things that we believe. I think that books are special. Books are sacred. And I think that when you are selling books, you have to remember that in all the profits and loss, in all of that, you are treading on sacred ground."
