Stereotypical New Yorker Quotes

I really feel now like a native New Yorker. And I'm very happy here. ~ Joan Collins

We have a game we play when we're waiting for tables in restaurants, where you have to write the five things that describe yourself on a piece of paper. When I was [in my twenties], I would have put: ambitious, Wellesley graduate, daughter, Democrat, single. Ten years later not one of those five things turned up on my list. I was: journalist, feminist, New Yorker, divorced, funny. Today not one of those five things turns up in my list: writer, director, mother, sister, happy. ~ Nora Ephron

I'm South American, and growing up in New York, I had the total stereotypical way of thinking of what Texas was about. I'm like, Texas. Big. Cows. Cowboys. Cowboy hats and cowboy boots. And barbeque. ~ Paula Garces

I lived in New York for 10 years, and every New Yorker sees a shrink. ~ Meg Rosoff

I've always believed that thoughtful people don't really take the tabloids seriously. They're basically a form of entertainment. I enjoy them as much as the next New Yorker. ~ Woody Allen

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

Eleanor Gordon was the most sophisticated in their crowd. She read The New Yorker. ~ Judy Blume

'The New Yorker' didn't invent the magazine cartoon, but it did really establish it. ~ Robert Mankoff

I travel so much when I work, I've really been happy to do 'Nice Work' because I feel like a true New Yorker again. I have my little regimen during the day, and I can take advantage of the museums and the things that I love. And people watching! ~ Blythe Danner

I am more of a New Yorker than ever and just actually, sometimes I fantasize about living somewhere else, where it's maybe not quite so crowded or stressful, blah, blah, blah and after September 11th, I guess I could just not imagine living anywhere else. ~ Sigourney Weaver

I mean, if you have any idea of any kind of complexity or immensity or destiny, of general order, you're put in a position of nothingness. And I think this is true. I don't think I'm anything; I never have thought that. Whatever it is that activates it is a certain kind of energy that goes on. But the effect is ridiculous; it's absurd."
--Lincoln Kirstein in "The New Yorker ~ Lincoln Kirstein

To me, what defines a New Yorker is the edge that one develops from having actually lived here. Once you have it, it doesn't go away, and everywhere else in the world feels like it is in slow motion. ~ Donald Trump, Jr.

Being a New Yorker is never having to say you are sorry. ~ Lily Tomlin

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

That was another thing Ruby would miss about New York, if she were leaving: she's miss how much space people gave you. You could have a fucking sobbing fit on the subway and no one would mess with you. You could barf in a garbage can on the street corner and no one would mess with you. If you were giving off invisible vibes, people respected that. People thought New Yorkers were rude, but really they were just leaving you to your own stuff. It was respectful! In a city with so many people, a New Yorker would always pretend not to see you when you didn't want to be seen. ~ Emma Straub

I was kind of an unhappy kid. I always felt like a cynical New Yorker trapped in a little kid's body. I started to get some pretty bad anxiety disorders around puberty, which totally did not work with growing up a mile away from the beach. I started cutting my own hair. ~ Rachel Bloom

I'm a Tennessean at heart, and a New Yorker in spirit. ~ Rachel Boston

The older I get the more grateful I am not to be told how everything comes out. ~ Mavis Gallant

My parents put the New Yorker in my crib. I saw Vogue and Vanity Fair around the house before I could read. ~ Richard Avedon

Then, gradually, women began to enter vet schools. By 1975, they represented half of all students; by 2000, nearly three-quarters - and most of them wanted to treat pets. ~ The New Yorker

Last summer had meant lots of Sam Adams Summer Ale by herself on hot weekend days when it seemed like just her and the Dominican Day parade. ~ Stephanie Clifford

I could live here forever. Maybe even become real New Yorker someday. ~ Candace Bushnell

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

I've always essentially been a New Yorker. ~ Lawrence Block

Stewart, with the help of his incredibly astute staff, was combining reporting with commentary, pointing a finger at stupidity and hollowness, and devising a creative hand grenade. All of it had political purpose and direction. It wasn't strictly ideological, although he's obviously left of center. And he was fearless, not in the sense that anybody was going to make him a political prisoner. But he punched up. He punched up, and the shots landed.

I don't think the world is any more absurd now than it's ever been, or more tragic, or more beautiful. But Jon took advantage of these new ways of seeing the world and took out his magic marker and drew circles around the idiocy. He set out to be a working comedian, and he ended up an invaluable patriot. He wants his country to be better, more decent, and to think harder.

~ DAVID REMNICK, editor in chief, the New Yorker ~ Chris Smith

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

Anyone who held that belief, as Richard Rovere was to explain in The New Yorker, "forgot the wisdom of history, which is that members of the United States Senate almost invariably come to grief when they try to win Presidential nominations for themselves or to manipulate national conventions for any purpose whatsoever. For many reasons - patronage is one, and control of delegations is another - the big men at conventions are governors and municipal leaders. ~ Robert A. Caro

I would kind of, you know, go stand next to some unlucky guy and say eventually, Hi, I'm George. You know, I'm with The New Yorker. I'm a liberal. I'm somewhat left of Gandhi. Do you want to talk? And, you know, they always did. ~ George Saunders

I knew I didn't want to come out in the 'New Yorker'; it just felt wrong. It needed an African conversation. ~ Binyavanga Wainaina

I'm a New Yorker. I like the big streets and the big buildings. It's a great place to walk. ~ Ed Askew

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

In the high level cartoon world, my number one admired hero would be Chas Addams - really a top, top artist that the 'New Yorker' was lucky to find and employ. ~ Peter Beard

I still think of myself really as a New Yorker. ~ Parker Stevenson

I never studied art, but taught myself to draw by imitating the New Yorker cartoonists of that day, instead of doing my homework. ~ Bil Keane

Elizabeth ran her finger along the windowsill, gathering dust. The view was almost exactly the same as from her own bedroom, only a few degrees shifted. She could still see the Rosens' place, with its red door and folding shutters, and the Martinez house, with its porch swing and the dog bowl. She'd heard once that what made you a real New Yorker was when you could remember back three laters -- the place on the corner that had been a bakery and then a barbershop before it was a cell-phone store, or the restaurant that had been Italian, then Mexican, then Cuban. The city was a palimpsest, a Mod Podged pileup or old signage and other people's failures. Newcomers saw only what was in front of them, but people who had been there long enough were always looking at two or three other places simultaneously. The IRT, Canal Jeans, the Limelight. So much of the city she'd fallen in love with was gone, but then again, that's how it worked. It was your job to remember. At least the bridges were still there. Some things were too heavy to take down. ~ Emma Straub

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

Eventually, my highbrow parents, who so hated the Eisenhower suburban culture of the 1950s that the only magazines they subscribed to were 'The Atlantic' and 'The New Yorker,' broke down and got 'Life' magazine. ~ Sally Mann

I am aware of myself as a four-hundred-year-old woman, born in the captivity of a colonial, pre-industrial oral culture and living now as a contemporary New Yorker. ~ Bharati Mukherjee