Best 91 quotes in «nyc quotes» category

At one point, I began to think that I had a divine doorman. Lenny was the most unlikely incarnation of God I could imagine, and yet, I kept drifting irresistibly towards this absurd conclusion. Despite my staunchly atheistic inclinations, I couldn't explain Lenny any other way. But eventually I came to my senses and realized that he was just one of those game show freaks with an encyclopedic memory. That didn't make him God, did it? Would God proclaim so regularly how much he likes Patsy's Pizza?

When I was starting out there was no Internet, there wasn't this sense that you could be connected to other writers around the world. And that created a kind of innocence, or parochial quality, even in NYC.

We all have those moments where we realize how easily our lives could be so different, for better or for worse. I met my husband at a gym in NYC! What if I'd joined a different gym? What if I hadn't worked out in the afternoons? These questions are endless.

When I think about moguls, I think like Donald Trump who... owns NYC practically. That's a mogul. I feel like I'm on my way to a lot more, but mogul is a really serious thing. I think it's a word that gets thrown around easily.

A new star has been born and Vera’s performance brings alive the desolate life of O’Neil’s young heroine in a natural talent that is so fresh and yet so ageless.

…but I think comedy is more aggressive than that. It is a medium for revenge. We can deflate and punish the pomposity and the rejection which hurt us. Comedy is power.

BUILDING A SUCCESSFUL BRAND IS CONVINCING THE FULL BELLY THAT IT IS STILL HUNGRY AND HAS ROOM FOR MORE. BE, THE MORE THAT THEY WANT! -HOPENATION

But no place gives you everything. I'm equally mistrustful of the energy bursts New York gives you, which fragment and exhaust you. Living there gives you a phony sense of self-importance and confidence. If you're at all anxious, the city acts out your anxiety for you, leaving you feeling strangely peaceful.

BEING GREEDY IS NOT TRUSTING THAT GOD WILL PROVIDE MORE! PLEASE BELIEVE HIM! #HOPENATION

ERIC: What are you always writin' in that book anyway? RODNEY: Poetry. TYRONE: Poetry? Rodney stops sketching and sentimentally flips through a few dozen pages of sketches and handwritten poems and notes. RODNEY: Poetry and pictures. Snapshots of our lives developed in the darkrooms of our souls." From CENTRAL PARK SONG -- a screenplay

Carlos, your mysophobia does affect my health. I feel freer – more alive, more vivacious and, ironically enough, healthier – if I’m not constantly made to worry about germs and unhealthy choices. Whether it’s for a moment of spontaneous kissing in a phone booth or eating an occasional hamburger…Obsessing about your health doesn’t actually make you healthier. The fact of the matter is, Carlos, our bodies are decaying at every moment, regardless of what we do. Living is bad for your health.” “It doesn’t have to be.” “Maybe if you live in an antiseptic bubble specially designed by the CDC it doesn’t. But in a place like New York City, you’re fighting a pointless battle. You can either embrace the dirt and the germs as part of the risky joy of living in an exciting, overpopulated metropolis, or you can spend lots of mental real estate obsessing over whether you touched a few extra microbes when you got on the subway.

For you cannot live in New York City very long and not be conscious of the niceties of being rich—the city is, after all, an ecstatic exercise in merchandising—and one evening of his visit to Venezuela Sutherland sat straight up when he read a line of Santayana’s: “Money is the petrol of life.

Everything comes out of smoke and mist and nothingness, a mystical happening…

Every time you stumble upon a rock, use it as a new step to keep climbing your way to success.

Everyone in New York City thinks they are famous without being famous.

Everyone needs beauty. Even beautiful people" From "Central Park Song

{...]I began to feel tears of frustration build up in my eyes, yearning to free themselves from their glandular prisons.

Here, I felt, winter brought no desolation; it was tamed, like a polar bear led on a leash by a beautiful lady.

I am driven. Being driven is my energy source. It is my fun.…I believe that where there is action, there is movement, and those ripples will eventually produce something positive.

GOD SAYS; YOU'LL NEVER LOSE A FIGHT THAT WASN'T FIXED! #HOPENATION

HAVING THE ANSWER DOES NOT ALWAYS MEAN YOU KNOW HOW TO SOLVE THE PROBLEM -HOPENATION

If I took the nicer subway, it meant I had to go through Manhattan every morning to get there, and that took a really long time. The subway line that ran the short way was the G line, which stopped exclusively in Brooklyn and Queens. That might be the only time the word exclusive has been used to describe the G train.

I'd known since I was a child that I was going to live in New York eventually, and that everything in between would just be an intermission. I'd spent all those years imagining what New York was going to be like. I thought it was going to be the most exciting, magical, fraught-with-possibility place that you could ever live; a place where if you really wanted something you might be able to get it; a place where I'd be surrounded by people I was dying to know; a place where I might be able to become the only thing worth being, a journalist. And I'd turned out to be right.

If Los Angeles is a woman reclining billboard model and the San Fernando Valley is her teenybopper sister, then New York is their cousin. Her hair is dyed autumn or aubergine or Egyptian henna, depending on her mood. Her skin is pale as frost and she wears beautiful Jil Sander suits and Prada pumps on which she walks faster than a speeding taxi (when it is caught in rush hour, that is). Her lips are some unlikely shade of copper or violet, courtesy of her local MAC drag queen makeup consultant.

I don't know who you are," she thought, "but whoever you are, you're one hell of a player.

I had a blind date with a dentist — and he told me to come back in six months.

IF THEY DON'T INVITE YOU TO THE PARTY TODAY; STRIVE TO BE THE REASON THEY "TRY" TO CELEBRATE WITH YOU TOMORROW! #HOPENATION

I had always been an atheist until I met Lenny. He was too wonderously complex and good for there to be no benevolent and intelligent force behind our marvelous cosmos. Lenny gave me the actual proof my fiercely skeptical mind had always demanded. Not some logical, 37-step proof of God's existence. It was a personal proof. And it was irrefutable.

Love isn’t a curse, Lucas, it’s a gift.

I have never learned how to tell somebody something good about myself; that should be a secret they must find out .

I love Israel, I go back all the time. I just love New York a little more. My workers are Arabs, my best friend is a black man from Alabama, my girlfriend's a Puerto Rican, and my landlord is a half-Jew bastard. You know what I did this morning? I read in the paper yesterday that the circus is setting up in the Madison Square Garden, they said the elephants would be walking through the Holland Tunnel at dawn. I'm a photographer a little too, you know? So I get up at five o'clock, bike over to the tunnel, and wait. It turns out the paper got it wrong, they came through the Lincoln, but still, you know? This is a hell of a place.

It was hard to believe it had finally come down to the nuking of New York City. A virus had managed to bring about what decades of the Cold War and terrorist threats could not accomplish. The United States would never be the same. A major city had been destroyed. Millions were dead.

I look for ambiguity because life is ambiguous!

I MUST BE A TIME TRAVELLER BECAUSE I AM ALWAYS AHEAD OF MY TIME

I said, "Is there!" I told him there is a Mafia school where they teach them math — if Johnny has ten fingers and they cut off two, how many does he have left?

It gathers emotionally inside you, in a strange way a by-product of struggle, of a willingness to do anything, try anything, expose yourself to anything — staying in motion because sooner or later those ripples will cause change.

It was a brave city, she decided, eyeing them. Brave in its other sense; not courageous, so much as outstanding, commanding. It was too nice a town to die in. Though it had no honeysuckle vines and no balconies and no guitars, it was meant for love. For living and for love, and the two were inseparable; one didn't come without the other. ("Too Nice A Day To Die")

Night is the permanent revolution, that of the globe. Every sundown the streets change, becoming sinister or libidinous, or, for that matter, longer or narrower or unexpectedly twisted. The familiar rebels against those who presume to know it. The map is altered and time is telescoped. Daylight restores things to their normal condition, or is that really their normal condition? The map of the city wrinkles and unfolds, wrinkles and unfolds.

Maybe that is why in my comedy I try and puncture the hypocrisy all around us, why it is almost a crusade with me to strip life down to what really is true.

MIND YOUR OWN SOCIAL MEDIA BUSINESS

Oh, Williamsburg. There was a point when you seemed like a scary, tough neighborhood, but now it's obvious that the graffiti on your walls gets put there by art students.

Oh no. I'm not gonna let you leave yet. I'm gonna show you the value of takin' your time to get to work. I probably should have done this a long time ago.

People say it is not the key to happiness, but I have always figured if you have enough money you can have a key made.

PRACTICE MAKES THE HARD THINGS EASY

She likes the mystery of that changeover, those fifteen minutes of sundown when the streets and trees and people and parked cars are delicate and immediate, every sound and smell and movement amplified by the lowest light or the lightest darkness. Even a city that’s broken and dirty can, in that time, be divine and intimate.

Probably everything in my life comes back to a feeling of abandonment, and this city never abandons you.

She was so cool, as she knew, ankles crossed at the puckered hem of granite gray sweatpants, and she also knew I was watching from the open door of the B train—watching her pose in apparent comfort at the girder of this city thoroughfare.

Somehow, some way, every person in the arts has to find an accommodation with disappointment and embarrassment. They are the pollen in the air we breathe.

The war years ended the depression, but brought on many other stressful problems, such as living in a country that was at war with my parents’ homeland. Life changed, and with so many men being drafted into the military, jobs at last became available. By this time, my father was beyond the age of compulsory military service and fortunately found employment as a cook in midtown Manhattan. My parents sold the burdensome delicatessen and bought a house at nearby 25 Nelson Avenue. For years thereafter, my father worked at the then-famous Lindy’s Restaurant on Broadway in New York City. Starting as a cook, he was soon elevated to Night Chef. Eventually he became the Sous Chef and later the Head Chef at the well-known restaurant. It was a long commute into the city by both bus and train, but his steady employment, gratefully, brought in a sustaining income. Fuel and food were rationed during the war years, so there were times when he brought home meaty bones, supposedly for our dog “Putzy,” which instead wound up in our soup pot, which of course we shared with our dog. Most people we knew were poor and struggling to make ends meet, but since everyone was in the same boat, we took our lifestyle in stride. Things were still difficult, but we had shelter and food. I guess you might say we were luckier than most.

Sometimes, down in the subway, a train Maxine's riding on will slowly be overtaken by a local or an express on the other track, and in the darkness of the tunnel, as the windows of the other train move slowly past, the lighted panels appear one by one, like a series of fortune-telling cards being deal and slid in front of her. The Scholar, The Unhoused, The Warrior Thief, The Haunted Woman... After a while Maxine has come to understand that the faces framed in these panels are precisely those out of all the city millions she must in the hour be paying most attention to, in particular those whose eyes actually meet her own - they are the day's messengers from whatever the Beyond has for a Third World, where the days are assembled one by one under non-union conditions. Each messenger carrying the props required for their character, shopping bags, books, musical instruments, arrived here out of darkness, bound again into darkness, with only a minute to deliver the intelligence Maxine needs. At some point naturally she begins to wonder if she might not be performing the same role for some face looking back out another window at her.