Top New York Quotes

I don't like Los Angeles. The people are awful and terribly shallow, and everybody wants to be famous but nobody wants to play the game. I'm from New York. I will kill to get what I need.

She went weak in the knees and could barely walk as she followed him, trembling with fear. Her hopes for a happy future with Jordan came crashing down. Whoever had told Jordan she was free to travel u...

That was 1993 grunge in suburbia. This was 2003 hell in Harlem. (Dark City Lights)

To be a Christian without prayer is no more possible than to be alive without breathing.

And I wonder, therefore, how James Atlas can have been so indulgent in his recent essay ‘The Changing World of New York Intellectuals.’ This rather shallow piece appeared in the magazine, and took us...

Though Alec had never seen the occupants of the first floor loft, they seemed to be engaged in a tempestuous romance. Once there had been a bunch of someone's belongings strewn all over the landing wi...

Seeing the name in a headline last week—a headline about a life that had involved real achievement—I felt a mouse stirring in the attic of my memory. Eventually, I was able to recall how the two Hill...

I could simply kill you now, get it over with, who would know the difference? I could easily kick you in, stove you under, for all those times, mean on gin, you rammed words into my belly. (p. 52)

Pettiness often leads both to error and to the digging of a trap for oneself. Wondering (which I am sure he didn't) 'if by the 1990s [Hitchens] was morphing into someone I didn’t quite recognize, Blum...

A year earlier my parents had moved us out of the city to a split-level on Long Island, their idea of the American dream, which meant it as now an hour-and-a-half commute via the 7:06 Hicksville to Pe...

Inevitably came the time when he angrily repudiated his former paladin Yasser Arafat. In fact, he described him to me as 'the Palestinian blend of Marshal Petaín and Papa Doc.' But the main problem, a...

These are tough times for state governments. Huge deficits loom almost everywhere, from California to New York, from New Jersey to Texas.

One might come up with other and kinder distinctions (I shall not be doing so) but the plain fact about the senator from New York is surely that she is a known quantity who has already been in the Whi...

The city was a hive from this height, the people and the yellow cabs moving about in the street below like pre-programmed insects. (Dark City Lights)

A New York plate that said you die. (Dark City Lights)

[H]e could see the island of Manhattan off to the left. The towers were jammed together so tightly, he could feel the mass and stupendous weight.Just think of the millions, from all over the globe, wh...

Its magnificence was indescribable, and its magnitude was inconceivable. She felt overwhelmed in the presence of its greatness. Pg 87

THE NEXT DAY WAS RAIN-SOAKED and smelled of thick sweet caramel, warm coconut and ginger. A nearby bakery fanned its daily offerings. A lapis lazuli sky was blanketed by gunmetal gray clouds as it wep...

To people from 'Brooklyn-Brooklyn' North Brooklyn is really just South Queens.

Why are you perpetuating a childhood you grew up despising? Pg 57