New Yorkers Quotes

The expansion of tobacco cessation centers is an important part of our historic and continuing effort to help smokers quit. The expansion of these centers will give even more New Yorkers the help they need to quit once and for all. ~ George Pataki

Just as police and fire sirens reminded New Yorkers they were home, the sound of car bombs reminded me I was in Baghdad, which had become home for me. I was like a battered wife who can't leave the man abusing her. I had moved into stage four and assumed, as a matter of math, that I was going to die in Baghdad. But still I wanted to stay. ~ Richard Engel

I feel like I'm a New Yorker because I really know the city. I actually tell the drivers where to go - I have this bad habit, I always question the drivers. I do that all the time because I feel like I know the best way, when really it's like, 'Yo, man, shut up. This dude does this every day of his life.' ~ J. Cole

Once they are charged, too many poor New Yorkers find themselves trapped by our unjust bail system. Unable to pay for bail, they languish in Rikers Island or other jails while they await trial, regardless of guilt. ~ Eric Schneiderman

The thing about our country, Americans, and New Yorkers in particular, we all want to help. There's real folks who want to help. The problem is, they don't know how. They don't know how to get involved. ~ Hill Harper

I may be one of the last New Yorkers who actually drives in the city daily. ~ Donald Trump, Jr.

'The New Yorker's' drama critics have always had a comparable authority because, for the most part, the magazine made it a practice to employ critics who moonlighted in the arts. They worked both sides of the street, so to speak. ~ John Lahr

New Yorkers may think they're on some cutting edge, but that's not especially true. It is, however, the most exciting heterogeneous mess of a town I've ever seen. ~ Carter Burwell

I am just a normal human being - I am alive! Why is anyone surprised that I am human? Like many New Yorkers, I have a multifaceted life. ~ Nouriel Roubini

For all the energy directed toward the stratagem of big city living, New Yorkers are never too distracted to respond to, and more often, proactively assist visitors. Tourists tracing the routes of subway maps with their fingers, squinting at street signs or staring at a slip of paper with confusion are typical recipients of our generosity. We know our city can be as challenging as it is fascinating, and we want visitors to have a good experience. ~ Gina Greenlee

I always had the most fun going to the beach on the weekends with my friends. In a way, we treated our beach style the way New Yorkers treat their street style, so I was always conscious of how I looked. ~ Izabel Goulart

We are New Yorkers. Proud citizens of the greatest city on earth. Thinking big isn't new to us. It is the very foundation of who we are. ~ Bill De Blasio

Before I opened my computer in the parking lot today, I relived one of my favorite memories. It's the one with Woody and me sitting on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum after it's closed. We're watching people parade out of the museum in summer shorts and sandals. The trees to the south are planted in parallel lines. The water in the fountain shoots up with a mist that almost reaches the steps we sit on. We look at silver-haired ladies in red-and-white-print dresses. We separate the mice from the men, the tourists from the New Yorkers, the Upper East Siders from the West Siders. The hot-pretzel vendor sells us a wad of dough in knots with clumps of salt stuck on top. We make our usual remarks about the crazies and wonder what it would be like to live in a penthouse apartment on Fifth Avenue overlooking the Met. We laugh and say the same things we always say. We hold hands and keep sitting, just sitting, as the sun beings to set. It's a perfect afternoon. ~ Diane Keaton

Deprived of the opportunity to judge one another by the cars we drive, New Yorkers, thrown together daily on mass transit, form silent opinions based on our choices of subway reading. Just by glimpsing the cover staring back at us, we can reach the pinnacle of carnal desire or the depths of hatred. Soul mate or mortal enemy. ~ David Rakoff

When a village ceases to be a community, it becomes oppressive in its narrow conformity. So one becomes an individual and migrates to the city. There, finding others like-minded, one re-establishes a village community. Nowadays only New Yorkers are yokels. ~ Paul Goodman

I have a bold plan to break from the Bloomberg years, and end the 'Tale of Two Cities' by providing real opportunity to all New Yorkers, no matter where they live. ~ Bill De Blasio

The reason to drive this point home with a vivid and frank comparison is many New Yorkers are still not confronting the reality of how serious our crisis is. It was an exhortation to face reality. ~ Eliot Spitzer

The NYPD has too urgent a mission and too few officers for us to waste time and resources on broad, unfocused surveillance. We have a responsibility to protect New Yorkers from violent crime or another terrorist attack - and we uphold the law in doing so. ~ Raymond Kelly

Each generation identifies with a small group of people said to have lived lives exemplifying the vices and virtues of that generation. If one were to choose a trial lawyer whose life reflected the unique characteristics of America's "Wild West" of a criminal justice system in the latter half of the Twentieth Century, that person likely would be my father.

New York City of the 1960s until the turn of the 21st century was the world's epicenter of organized and white-collar crime. During those four decades, the most feared mafia chiefs, assassins, counterfeiters, Orthodox Jewish money launderers, defrocked politicians of every stripe, and Arab bankers arriving in the dead of night in their private jets, sought the counsel of one man: my father, Jimmy La Rossa.

Once a Kennedy-era prosecutor, Brooklyn-born Jimmy La Rossa became one of the greatest criminal trial lawyers of his day. He was the one man who knew where all of the bodies were buried, and everyone knew it. It seemed incomprehensible that Jimmy would one day just disappear from New York. Forever.

After stealing my dying father from New York Presbyterian Hospital to a waiting Medevac jet, the La Rossa Boys, as we became known, spent the next five years in a place where few would look for two diehard New Yorkers: a coastal town in the South Bay of Los Angeles, aptly named Manhattan Beach.

While I cooked him his favorite Italian dishes and kept him alive using the most advanced ~ James M. LaRossa Jr.

New Yorkers were grateful when Donald J. Trump finished ahead of schedule and under budget in renovating the Wollman Memorial Rink, where the city had spent six years and $12 million trying to produce ice. ~ Andrew Rosenthal

I don't mind other guys seeing movies I want to see and then writing about them. That's fine, especially when it's the 'New Yorker's Anthony Lane, because he knows this stuff pretty well. ~ Rachel Sklar

If you are not a New Yorker, when you arrive there for the first time you have the impression you grew up there because you've seen it in so many films. It's been filmed from every single angle and by so many different filmmakers that you know the streets, the sidewalks, the architecture, the cabs, the temper of the people. ~ Deniz Gamze Erguven

If for some reason you are unsure where to go, all you have to do is stand there looking lost, and within seconds a helpful New Yorker will approach to see if you have any "spare" change. ~ Dave Barry

As a New Yorker you can't help but be proud of the fact that so much music and culture started here. Punk rock, jazz, hip-hop and house music started here, George Gershwin debuted 'Rhapsody in Blue' here; the Velvet Underground are from New York. ~ Moby

I would not waste time, as Senator Gillibrand does, on things such as dictating a national minimum driving age and sponsoring a 'National Day of Play.' I'd help New Yorkers understand that we get less in value from Washington than what we send there in taxes. ~ Wendy E. Long

Look, we live in a very dangerous world. We know there are people who want to take away our freedoms. New Yorkers probably know that as much if not more than anybody else after the terrible tragedy of 9/11. ~ Michael Bloomberg

Congressmember Weiner has shown just a pattern of reckless behavior, an inability to tell the truth, and what New Yorkers deserve is a mayor with a record of delivering for them, of vision, and a level of maturity and responsibility. ~ Christine Quinn

His laugh and his voice were both pleasant. He talked the way New Yorkers used to talk before they learned to talk Flatbush. ~ Raymond Chandler

I'm a New Yorker; I've paid my dues. ~ Zoe Kravitz

Publication in 'The New Yorker' meant everything, and it's no exaggeration to say that it changed my life. ~ Daniel Alarcon

I notice that he keeps his head down, his chin tucked - trying to conceal his face.

I lift his chin. "This hiding-in-plain-sight thing only works if you don't act like you're trying to hide something."

He grins a little self-consciously - and the dimples show up. Mmm.

"Most of the people here would never think that you'd be here - and the few that do are probably too chill to make a big deal about it. New Yorkers are cool about celebrity stuff."

He looks at me like I'm nuts. "Not the ones I've seen."

I shrug. "They're probably from Jersey. ~ Emma Chase

The creative core of New York has never been native New Yorkers; it's people from all over the world. ~ Steve Earle

The narrative songs were well-written, like an article in The New Yorker. They're nice and pat. They're more like I'm just showing I can do that when I write a song like that. It's not my true calling. ~ Stephen Malkmus

The whole point of bike-sharing is to give New Yorkers another way to commute. A lot of folks in Bay Ridge work in downtown Brooklyn or other parts of the borough. For them, it would make more sense to hop on a Citi Bike than to wait for a train or a bus. ~ Sal Albanese

There is something in the New York air that makes sleep useless. ~ Simone De Beauvoir

In the summer New York was the only place in which one could escape from New Yorkers ... ~ Edith Wharton

These are tough times, and the New Yorkers I have met are facing economic adversity with grace and dignity. They worry about their future, care about their neighbors and hope this storm will pass so they can focus on better days ahead. ~ Harold Ford, Jr.

I don't feel American. I do feel like a New Yorker. I think there's a real distinction there. A city allows you to become a citizen even when you're not a national. ~ Salman Rushdie

There's that stigma about New Yorkers, how they're so mean, but in my experience it was quite the opposite. People were very genuine and very nice, even on the subway. ~ Taylor Kitsch

Every single day, we have hundreds, if not thousands of police officers protecting the lives of not just New Yorkers, but the millions who come to New York City to work and to vacation. ~ Vito Fossella

For a Bostonian ... we live in the shadow of New York, and to be acknowledged by New Yorkers is really the greatest feeling. ~ Donnie Wahlberg

What's so fascinating about New Yorkers is that each person has a whole lexicon of personal logic in the way that they decipher and do what has to be done to enjoy, stay alive, take pleasure in this place. ~ Spalding Gray

The New Yorker has always dealt with experience not by trying to understand it but by prescribing the attitude to be adopted toward it. This makes it possible to feel intelligent without thinking, and it is a way of making everything tolerable, for the assumption of a suitable attitude toward experience can give one the illusion of having dealt with it adequately. ~ Robert Warshow

Every true New Yorker believes with all his heart that when a New Yorker is tired of New York, he is tired of life. ~ Robert Moses

The most divisive issue facing New Yorkers in 2013 is stop and frisk, a tactic used by law enforcement to stop, question, and frisk people suspected of a crime. ~ Sal Albanese

I'm always pointing things out to native New Yorkers that I think are weird about this place and their culture and all that. But I feel like my friends and family from California feel like I've totally "become a New Yorker." ~ Adrian Tomine

After the 9/11 apocalypse happened in New York City, people, particularly New Yorkers, who breathed in the ash, or saw the results of that, have a tendency to keep seeing echoes and having flashbacks to it. ~ Stephen King

I have published in 'The New Yorker,' 'Holiday,' 'Life,' 'Mademoiselle,' 'American Heritage,' 'Horizon,' 'The Ladies Home Journal,' 'The Kenyon Review,' 'The Sewanee Review,' 'Poetry,' 'Botteghe Oscure,' the 'Atlantic Monthly,' 'Harper's.' ~ Paul Engle

I think I'll be Scottish in every movie I write. They always try to talk me out of it, but Woody Allen is always a nebbish New Yorker. Why shouldn't I be a goofy Glaswegian? ~ Craig Ferguson

west. He liked the mild climate, the Sierras making it something like Colorado with a seashore. It took him several years to overcome the natural though secret belief of true New Yorkers, that people living somewhere else had to be, in some sense, kidding. ~ Gregory Benford

Secret ops by secret forces have a nasty tendency to produce unintended, unforeseen, and completely disastrous consequences. New Yorkers will remember well the end result of clandestine U.S. support for Islamic militants against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan during the 1980s: 9/11. ~ Nick Turse

If this fails to convince, I being out my secret weapon, announcing with portentous deliberation that Barbara. Damn. Walters. Does. Not. Drive. Heard of her?
This sort of accusatory conversion of course almost never goes down with native New Yorkers, people who, like Barbara Walters, live in that barbaric third world country that is Manhattan, and thus have yet to hear of newfangled American Advances like automobiles, happiness, and yards. ~ Sarah Vowell

Just like New Yorkers themselves, the trees in New York [city] work harder than any others in the world. ~ Andy Warhol

At the end of the day, New Yorkers need a mayor who understands the problems they face, brings a smart plan and good people to the table, and, more than anything, has the independence, courage and conviction to do the right thing. ~ Sal Albanese

It was an incredible resource. I'd sit with a big stack of bound New Yorkers in the library and read through, especially the 'Talk of the Town' sections. ~ Michael Chabon

Why, I've seen Kentuckians who hated whiskey, Virginians who weren't descended from Pocahontas, Indianians who hadn't written a novel, Mexicans who didn't wear velvet trousers with silver dollars sewed along the seams, funny Englishmen, spendthrift Yankees, cold-blooded Southerners, narrow- minded Westerners, and New Yorkers who were too busy to stop for an hour on the street to watch a one-armed grocer's clerk do up cranberries in paper bags. Let a man be a man and don't handicap him with the label of any section. ~ O. Henry

I will forever associate with New Yorkers - an instinctive and immediate push back against thinking small. She climbed out of the car, giving me no choice but to drive. 'Get over it and just live a little' was her message. ~ Michelle Obama

Greenwich Village always had its share of mind readers, but there are many more these days, and they seem to have moved closer to the mainstream of life in the city. What was crazy 10 years ago is now respectable, even among the best-educated New Yorkers. ~ Aravind Adiga

I know New Yorkers are gonna vote for a candidate - me - who has the longest record of delivering for them. They want a mayor who can deliver for them. And I'm the only one - I don't care who gets in - who has that record. ~ Christine Quinn

After the tragedy, New Yorkers are more united than ever in their vision, as well as in appreciation what living in freedom means - and that if we stand together, we can accomplish anything. ~ George Pataki

I know second-generation New Yorkers who have never been to Brooklyn; ~ Pete Hamill

The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding. ~ John Updike

And then there are the subway readers of difficult books. I like to imagine that New Yorkers are more literate than the riders of other American metropolises. ~ Sari Botton

New Yorkers have been fortunate to have Andrew Cuomo as our Attorney General - protecting working New Yorkers against the banks, insurance companies and big corporations. ~ Eric Schneiderman

It wasn't any one writer or article he was worried about, but the font. The meaning embedded, at a preconscious level, by the look of the magazine; the seal, as he described it, that the typography and layout put on dialectical thought. According to Perkus, to read the New Yorker was to find that you always already agreed, not with the New Yorker but, much more dismayingly, with yourself. I tried hard to understand. Apparently here was the paranoia Susan Eldred had warned me of: the New Yorker's font was controlling, perhaps attacking, Perkus Tooth's mind. To defend himself he frequently retyped their articles and printed them out in simple Courier, an attempt to dissolve the magazine's oppressive context. ~ Zadie Smith

New Yorkers are either the nicest or the rudest. ~ Janet McTeer

The World Trade Center site will forever hold a special place in our city, in our hearts. But we would be untrue to the best part of ourselves and who we are as New Yorkers and Americans if we said no to a mosque in lower Manhattan. ~ Michael Bloomberg

A lot of people have told me real New Yorkers are Mets fans ~ Curtis Granderson

As I walked down the street while talking on the phone, sophisticated New Yorkers gaped at the sight of someone actually moving around while making a phone call. Remember that in 1973, there weren't cordless telephones, let alone cellular phones. I made numerous calls, including one where I crossed the street while talking to a New York radio reporter - probably one of the more dangerous things I have ever done in my life. ~ Martin Cooper

My dream is not Hollywood, but to perform my act in English to 30 people in a Soho comedy club, to show New Yorkers what they look like from the French point of view. ~ Gad Elmaleh

Sophistication called for a variety of talents and attitudes, but the minimum requirement was being in New York. Not all New Yorkers achieved it, but nobody elsewhere had a prayer. ~ Barbara Holland

Another stereotype I spent a lot of time batting down: that Christians were all spittle-spewing hatemongers. I met a few of those in my travels, of course, but they struck me as a distinct minority. Wonbo and I - two nonreligious New Yorkers, one of them gay, the other gay-friendly - were never treated with anything short of respect. Often, in fact, what we found was kindness, hospitality, and curiosity. Yes, people would always ask whether we were believers, but when we said no, there were never gasps or glares. They may have thought we were going to hell, but they were perfectly nice about it. ~ Dan Harris

It's a dirty little secret that most New Yorkers are pleasant, thoughtful, patient, and polite. The Chamber of Commerce must work overtime to maintain the surly, off-putting image that is widely believed to define the city. In truth, niceness is nearly epidemic in this town. ~ Judith Kelman

Hip hop started in NY so it's important that New Yorkers realise that to talk about NY music and its sound should not be a small-minded conversation. Music is supposed to evolve. It's supposed to be going through changes, it's not supposed to sound exactly the same as what it did when it started. NY hip hop has to be allowed to move on and grow and expand. ~ Nas

New York is the only city in the world where you can get run down on the sidewalk by a pedestrian. ~ Russell Baker

I've been writing for a long time, since the late '60s. But it hasn't been in the same form. I used to write scripts for television. I wrote for my comedy act. Then I wrote screenplays, and then I started writing New Yorker essays, and then I started writing plays. I didn't start writing prose, really, until the New Yorker essays, but they were comic. I didn't start writing prose, really, until the '90s. In my head, there was a link between everything. One thing led to another. ~ Steve Martin

When people endure a traumatic event, they are either defeated or made stronger. On Sept. 11, I told New Yorkers, 'I want you to emerge stronger from this.' My words were partially a hope and partially an observation that people in New York City handle big things better than little things. I could not be more proud of the way my city responded. ~ Rudy Giuliani

I'll show Luke I can fit into the city. I'll show him I can be a true New Yorker. I'll go the gym, and then I'll eat a bagel, and I'll ... shoot someone, maybe?
Or maybe just the gym will be enough. ~ Sophie Kinsella

I know that many Irish-born New Yorkers are caught in the trap of our federal immigration policies. If we are going to continue to attract the best and the brightest - and Ireland has more than its fair share - we need to inject some common sense into our immigration laws, and I'm doing my best to make that case in Washington. ~ Michael Bloomberg

People in London think of London as the center of the world, whereas New Yorkers think the world ends three miles outside of Manhattan. ~ Toby Young

I think that, in comparison, New Yorkers and Northerners are so guarded. ~ Genevieve Gorder

I think in terms of being a New Yorker, as my friends would say, I don't take a lot of mess. I have no tolerance for people who are not thinking deeply about things. I have no tolerance for the kind of small talk that people need to fill silence. And I have no tolerance for people just not being a part of the world and being in it and trying to change it. ~ Jacqueline Woodson

'The New Yorker's fiction podcast I like a lot, where they have authors pick short stories by other authors that appeared in 'The New Yorker.' ~ Gillian Jacobs

I grew up eating hamburger helper, macaroni and cheese, and drinking lots of milk, and looked at lots of cows; but I feel like a New Yorker now, I've lived here for sixteen years. ~ Adam Rapp

Maybe we become New Yorkers the day we realize that New York will go on without us. ~ Colson Whitehead

I've done a lot of plays before where I had to do a New York accent, but never a Philly one before. They do the rhotic 'r' - where you say the 'r' - where most New Yorkers don't. ~ Jacki Weaver

We have a policy at The New Yorker, .. That is, if someone doesn't want to be profiled, we drop it. I would like you to show me the same courtesy. ~ William Shawn

I lived in New York my whole life. Like every New Yorker, I have stories about spending summers on the Jersey shore, riding the roller coaster in Seaside that is now famous for that sickening photo of it being washed out to sea. ~ Marissa Jaret Winokur

I was 30 when 9/11 happened and I had lived exactly 15 years of life in America, so I was half American. I was a full-fledged New Yorker. ~ Mohsin Hamid

Feeling is taboo, especially in New York. I read in some little magazine the other day that The New Yorker and The New York Times were sclerotic, meaning, "completely turned to rock." The critics here are that way. ~ James Purdy

Sixth-grade sweethearts. Wow. New Yorkers only commit to that type of monogamy with the Yankees or Giants ~ Gwendolyn Heasley

Every writer at the New Yorker is smarter than me. ~ Bob Dylan

New York's the place where you can have a private life. You can do anything, be anything you please. New Yorkers mind their own business. Police cars, ambulances, fire engines - nobody even turns around for them. We go to the movies for excitement. ~ Zelda Popkin

Yet, as only New Yorkers know, if you can get through the twilight, you'll live through the night. ~ Dorothy Parker

New Yorkers, by reputation, are fast-talking, assertive and easily annoyed; I fit right in. ~ Jane Pauley

If New Yorkers reduced portion size to 16 ounces from 20 ounces for one sugary drink every two weeks, it would collectively save approximately 2.3 million pounds over one year. ~ Casey Neistat

Black New Yorkers' distressing personal accounts of poverty and unemployment, inadequate housing, white supremacy and state-sanctioned violence politicized St. Clair, leading her to become one of New York's staunchest yet most unlikely voices against urban inequity. ~ LaShawn Harris

I get a little sick of these New Yorkers who want me to make some psychic thing, like 'The Left-Handed Gun.' They don't know anything about Western history. ~ Howard Hawks

New Yorkers are stuck in a gloomy mucilage of mutual commiseration. ~ Herb Caen

When I was a child growing up in Salinas we called San Francisco "the City". Of course it was the only city we knew, but I still think of it as the City, and so does everyone else who has ever associated with it. A strange and exclusive work is "city". Besides San Francisco, only small sections of London and Rome stay in the mind as the City. New Yorkers say they are going to town. Paris has no title but Paris. Mexico City is the Capital. p197 ~ John Steinbeck