Almost all the people I met in New York were trying to reduce.

New York is the place where all the aspirations of the Western World meet to form one vast master aspiration, as powerful as the suction of a steam dredge. It is the icing on the pie called Christian civilization.

The beauty of New York is unintentional; it arose independent of human design, like a stalagmite cavern.

Every year when it's Chinese New Year here in New York, there are fireworks going off at all hours. New York mothers calm their frightened children by telling them it's just gunfire.

Tip to out-of-town visitors. If you buy something here in New York and you want to have it shipped home, be suspicious if the clerk tells you they don't need your name and address.

Someone did a study of the three most-often-heard phrases in New York City. One is Hey taxi. Two is What train do I take to get to Bloomingdales? And three is Don't worry, it's only a flesh wound.

This warning from the New York City Department of Health Fraud: Be suspicious of any doctor who tries to take your temperature with his finger.

New York now leads the world's great cities in the number of people around whom you shouldn't make a sudden move.

Anyway, I don't want to live in New York. I want some place more like where we used to live in New Jersey I don't like living here. There aren't any trees.

This great city has fed my imagination-it has allowed me to dream.

It is one of the sublime provincialities of New York that its inhabitants lap up trivial gossip about essential nobodies they've never set eyes on, while continuing to boast that they could live somewhere for twenty years without so much as exchanging pleasantries with their neighbors across the hall.

Melting pot Harlem-Harlem of honey and chocolate and caramel and rum and vinegar and lemon and lime and gall. Dusky dream Harlem rumbling into a nightmare tunnel where the subway from the Bronx keeps right on downtown.

He lives with his mother and sister in Brooklyn and next week he is bringing Mary Agnes Keely home-in the grand tradition. I expect a delicious kielbasa and a picture of Kosciuszko in the front room.

Ernest Hemingway was always uneasy in New York and liked being there less than in any other city he frequented.

I lived in New York for a couple months. It seemed to me at first an incredibly clean place with well-dressed people and washed cars and bright-painted red-and-yellow streetcars and white buildings.

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.

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 never love anyone quite that way again.

New York was the glamorous town that you only see now in old movies and on Broadway stages. The sky was lit up with dancing neon signs. It was safe to walk out in the streets.

As long as what is is-and Georgia is Georgia-I will take Harlem for mine. At least, if trouble comes, I will have my own window to shoot from.

All of this-the shared apartment in the Village, the illicit relationship, the Friday-night train to a country house-was what he had imagined life in New York to be, and he was intensely happy.