51+ Most Famous New York Quotes: Exclusive Selection

Almost everybody fall in love with New York City. New York is a wellspring of inspiration, action, and romance. It has the world’s major commercial, financial and cultural centers. Its iconic sites include skyscrapers such as the Empire State Building and sprawling Central Park. Broadway theater is staged in neon-lit Times Square. Greatest quotes about New York City will show you different aspect of NYC and explain why everybody loves it.

If you’re searching for inspirational journey quotes and inspiring travel quotes that perfectly capture what you’d like to say or just want to feel inspired yourself, browse through an amazing collection of popular Florida quotes, powerful California quotes and famous Chicago quotes.

Best New York City Quotes

One’s life and passion may be elsewhere, but New York is where you prove if what you think in theory makes sense in life. Miuccia Prada

The great city of New York wields more of the destinies of this great nation than five times the population of any other portion of the country. Malcolm S. Forbes

If you want to become a real New Yorker, there’s only one rule: You have to believe New York is, has been, and always will be the greatest city on earth. The center of the universe. Ellen R. Shapiro

When I’m in New York, I just want to walk down the street and feel this thing, like I’m in a movie. Ryan Adams

It is ridiculous to set a detective story in New York City. New York City is itself a detective story. Agatha Christie 

quotes about New York City

It was never built for the comfort and happiness of its citizens, but to astonish the world. Susan Ertz

In order to love New York you have to hate it too. It’s like a love affair–you don’t hunger for it till it’s out of reach, and when you’ve had your fill, you need to separate. When you return, some of its unfamiliar, but oh my god, the beauty of it. Connie Eisenstat

Once you have lived in New York and it has become your home, no place else is good enough. John Steinbeck

When you leave New York, you are astonished at how clean the rest of the world is. Clean is not enough. Fran Lebowitz

If Louis was right, and you only get one great love, New York may just be mine. And I can’t have nobody talking shit about my boyfriend. Carrie Bradshaw

I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York’s skyline. Ayn Rand

The skyline of New York is a monument of a splendor that no pyramids or palaces will ever equal or approach. Ayn Rand

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. James Baldwin

The flag of New York City should be someone with four bags opening a door with their shoulder. Alex Baze

There’s something so romantic about being broke in New York. You gotta do it. You have to live there once without any money, and then you have to live there when you have money. Let me tell you, of the two, the latter is far better. Amy Poehler

Sometimes to walk in shaded parts of Manhattan is to be inserted into a Magritte: the street is night while the sky is the day. Joseph O’Neill

I don’t like cities. But I like New York. Other places make me feel like a dork. Madonna

New York is really the place to be; to go to New York, you’re going to the center of the world, the lion’s den. Zubin Mehta

I get out of the taxi and it’s probably the only city which in reality looks better than on the postcards, New York. Milos Forman

Some of us claim that New York City is the capital of the country, indeed the capital of the world. Now that may be a bit much for those who don’t come from New York, but clearly, we are an important city for reasons of our cultural advances. David Dinkins

A hundred times I have thought: New York is a catastrophe, and fifty times: it is a beautiful catastrophe. Le Corbusier

Inspirational New York City Quotes

More than anything else New York is a city of superlatives, a place where the best, the brightest, the biggest is the norm. Marilyn J. Appleberg

New York is a city that plays hard to get. You want me? You better work for it. I love the dirt combined with the adventure, the endless exploring (look up! go down that weird block!), the surprising specificity that you can find (button stores! Filipino barbecue!), and, of course, the mind-boggling stream of humans. Rony Vardi

Even if it ain’t all it seems, I got a pocketful of dreams. Baby, I’m from New York, a concrete jungle where dreams are made of. There’s nothing you can’t do. Now you’re in New York. These streets will make you feel brand new. Big lights will inspire you. Hear it for New York, New York, New York. Alicia Keys 

New York City is where specks of dust aspire randomly with all their cunning to become grains of sand. David B. Lentz

You can try to change New York, but it’s like Jay-Z says: ‘Concrete bunghole where dreams are made up. There’s nothing you can do.’ Liz Lemon

Coming to New York from the muted mistiness of London, as I regularly do, is like traveling from a monochrome antique shop to a technicolor bazaar. Kenneth Tynan

Guys like you can’t escape the city. Hell, you got a blood contract with this place. You’re married to the old girl. Mickey Spillane

In New York, the opportunities for learning, and acquiring a culture that shall not come out of the ruins, but belongs to life, are probably greater than anywhere else in the world. Thomas Wolfe

I look out the window and I see the lights and the skyline and the people on the street rushing around looking for action, love, and the world’s greatest chocolate chip cookie, and my heart does a little dance. Nora Ephron

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 beauty in the world. F. Scott Fitzgerald

Cut off as I am, it is inevitable that I should sometimes feel like a shadow walking in a shadowy world. When this happens I ask to be taken to New York City. Always I return home weary but I have the comforting certainty that mankind is real flesh and I myself am not a dream. Helen Keller

This is the city of dreamers and time and again it’s the place where the greatest dream of all, the American dream, has been tested and has triumphed. Michael Bloomberg

One belongs to New York instantly, one belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years. Tom Wolfe

Curtains forcing their will against the wind, children sleep, exchanging dreams with seraphim. The city drags itself awake on subway straps; and I, an alarm, awake as a rumor of war, lie stretching into dawn, unasked and unheeded. Maya Angelou

Being a New Yorker grounds you in every way. Before you walk out of the house, you can dress in the nicest clothes and be whoever you think you are, but when you’re on those streets, you’re just in the school of fish. Awkafina

New York is a diamond iceberg floating in river water. Truman Capote

Sometimes, from beyond the skyscrapers, the cry of a tugboat finds you in your insomnia, and you remember that this desert of iron and cement is an island. Albert Camus

It is often said that New York is a city for only the very rich and the very poor. It is less often said that New York is also, at least for those of us who came there from somewhere else, a city for only the very young. Joan Didion

Don’t you love New York in the fall? It makes me want to buy school supplies. I would send you a bouquet of newly sharpened pencils if I knew your name and address. Nora Ephron

The city is like poetry; it compresses all life, all races, and breeds, into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines. E.B. White

By comparison with other less hectic days, the city is uncomfortable and inconvenient; but New Yorkers temperamentally do not crave comfort and convenience—if they did they would live elsewhere. E.B. White

A middle finger is more New York than a corporate ambush. I bleed for my hometown, and I’d die for my fans. Lady Gaga

Quite simply, I was in love with New York. I do not mean ‘love’ in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and you never love anyone quite that way again. Joan Didion

I’m bound to say that New York’s a topping place to be exiled in. Everybody was awfully good to me, and there seemed to be plenty of things going on, and I’m a wealthy bird, so everything was fine. P.G. Wodehouse

New York is to the nation what the white church spire is to the village – the visible symbol of aspiration and faith, the white plume saying the way is up. E.B. White

People go to LA to find themselves, they come to New York to become someone new. Lindsey Kelk

While America will always, I think, feel foreign to me, New York City is my home. This is where I can construct my own identity freely and reject labels imposed on me. Raquel Cepeda

New York is made up of millions of different people, and they all come here looking for something. Lindsey Kelk

New York City is a great monument to the power of money and greed…a race for rent. Frank Lloyd Wright

New York is large, glamorous, easy-going, kindly, and incurious, but above all, it is a crucible – because it is large enough to be incurious. Ford Madox Ford