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This post is a collection of the best quotes about New York and New York captions for Instagram.
One of America’s most famous cities, the so called “the Big Apple”, New York has long been a favorite amongst Americans and tourists alike! Home to many world famous buildings, captivating Broadway shows, and a rich history, New York has become a must-see destination like no other.
Movies and series have frequently featured this vivacious city as their primary location and a key element of the story line, prominent figures have frequently sung its praises, and various authors have glorified its many assets in their written works.
Being such a popular tourist destination, and certainly one of the most important cities in the world, we simply had to curate a list of our favorite quotes about New York City.
Whether searching for catchy Instagram captions to go with that New York selfie or looking for inspiration to entice you to plan a trip to New York, this article is guaranteed to to get you in that New York state of mind. So sit back and feel inspired to book your next East Coast trip with this ultimate guide to the best New York quotes!
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Literary Quotes about New York
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 in The Great Gatsby
New York is an ugly city, a dirty city. Its climate is a scandal, its politics are used to frighten children, its traffic is madness, its competition is murderous.
– John Steinbeck in America and Americans
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 in Here is New York
I love New York, even though it isn’t mine, the way something has to be, a tree or a street or a house, something, anyway, that belongs to me because I belong to it.
– Truman Capote in Breakfast at Tiffany’s
In New York the opportunities for learning, and acquiring a culture that shall not come out of the ruins, but belong to life, are probably greater than anywhere else in the world.
– Thomas Wolfe in Of Time and the River
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 in Slouching Towards Bethlehem
A hundred times have I thought New York is a catastrophe, and fifty times: It is a beautiful catastrophe.
– Le Corbusier in When the Cathedrals Were White
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 in Heartburn
Nowhere has the number zero been of more philosophical value than in the United States…. and when the [train] plunged into a tunnel under New York City, with its lining of pipes and wires, I was out of the womb and into the birth canal.
– Kurt Vonnegut in Bluebeard
London is satisfied, Paris is resigned, but New York is always hopeful. Always it believes that something good is about to come off, and it must hurry to meet it.
– Dorothy Parker in The Portable Dorothy Parker
Each neighborhood of the city appeared to be made of a different substance, each seemed to have a different air pressure, a different psychic weight: the bright lights and shuttered shops, the housing projects and luxury hotels, the fire escapes and city parks.
– Teju Cole in Open City
The last time anybody made a list of the top hundred character attributes of New Yorkers, common sense snuck in at number 79.
– Douglas Adams in Mostly Harmless
Everything in New York is a photograph. All the things that are supposed to be dirty or rough or unrefined are the most beautiful things.
– Ann-Marie MacDonald in Fall on Your Knees
You don’t come to live here unless the delusion of a reality shaped around your own desires isn’t a strong aspect of your personality.
– Zadie Smith in Find Your Beach
More Famous Quotes About New York
There is no place like it, no place with an atom of its glory, pride, and exultancy. It lays its hand upon a man’s bowels; he grows drunk with ecstasy; he grows young and full of glory; he feels that he can never die.
– Walt Whitman
Once you have lived in New York and it has become your home, no place else is good enough.
– John Steinbeck
Here we are Marv. New York City, the land of opportunity.
– Harry, Home Alone 2
There is something in the New York air that makes sleep useless.
– Simone de Beauvoir
To Europe she was America. To America, she was the gateway to the earth. But to tell the story of New York would be to write a social history of the world.
– H.G. Wells
Make your mark in New York and you are a made man.
– Mark Twain
There is more sophistication and less sense in New York than anywhere else on the globe.
– Elbert Hubbard
One belongs to New York instantly; one belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years.
– Thomas Wolfe
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
New York is a work of art in and of itself. It’s a masterpiece that shouldn’t make sense, yet somehow, it does.
– Jacqueline E. Smith
When you leave New York, you are astonished at how clean the rest of the world is. Clean is not enough.
– Fran Lebowitz
It is ridiculous to set a detective story in New York City. New York City is itself a detective story.
– Agatha Christie
New York City is a great monument to the power of money and greed… a race for rent.
– Frank Lloyd Wright
I regret profoundly that I was not an American and not born in Greenwich Village. It might be dying, and there might be a lot of dirt in the air you breathe, but this is where it’s happening.
– John Lennon
You can do what you like, sir, but I’ll tell you this. New York is the true capital of America. Every New Yorker knows it, and by God, we always shall.
– Edward Rutherford
New York has a trip-hammer vitality which drives you insane with restlessness if you have no inner stabilizer.
– Henry Miller
Give me such shows — give me the streets of Manhattan!
– Walt Whitman
Quotes About New York City | New York City Quotes
There is more sophistication and less sense in New York than anywhere else on the globe.
– Elbert Hubbard
It was never built for the comfort and happiness of its citizens, but to astonish the world.
– Susan Ertz
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
I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York’s skyline.
– Ayn Rand
In New York, the sky is bluer, and the grass is greener, and the girls are prettier, and the steaks are thicker, and the buildings are higher, and the streets are wider, and the air is finer than the sky, or the grass, or the girls, or the steaks, or the air of any place else in the world.
– Edna Ferber
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
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
It’s an electrifying time for those of us who live in the city of Lady Liberty.
– Will Gleason
At night… the streets become rhythmical perspectives of glowing dotted lines, reflections hung upon them in the streets as the wistaria hangs its violet racemes on its trellis. The buildings are shimmering verticality, a gossamer veil, a festive scene-prop hanging there against the black sky to dazzle, entertain, amaze.
– Frank Lloyd Wright
I go to Paris, I go to London, I go to Rome, and I always say, ‘There’s no place like New York. It’s the most exciting city in the world now. That’s the way it is. That’s it.’
– Robert de Niro
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
Pull up the shades so I can see New York. I don’t want to go home in the dark.
– O. Henry
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
When it’s 100 degrees in New York, it’s 72 in Los Angeles. When it’s 30 degrees in New York, in Los Angeles it’s still 72. However, there are 6 million interesting people in New York, and only 72 in Los Angeles.
– Neil Simon
The wanderer in Manhattan must go forth with a certain innocence, because New York is best seen with innocent eyes.
– Pete Hamill
I don’t like cities. But I like New York. Other places make me feel like a dork.
– Madonna
It was never built for the comfort and happiness of its citizens, but to astonish the world.
– Susan Ertz
There is more sophistication and less sense in New York than anywhere else on the globe.
– Don Herald
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
I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York’s skyline.
– Ayn Rand
In New York, the sky is bluer, and the grass is greener, and the girls are prettier, and the steaks are thicker, and the buildings are higher, and the streets are wider, and the air is finer than the sky, or the grass, or the girls, or the steaks, or the air of any place else in the world.
– Edna Ferber
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
It’s an electrifying time for those of us who live in the city of Lady Liberty.
– Will Gleason
To start with, I love New York… It’s a little bit of the whole world… In New York, the whole world comes to you.
– Billy Graham
New York is the biggest collection of villages in the world.
– Alistair Cooke
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
As for New York City, it is a place apart. There is not its match in any other country in the world.
– Pearl S. Buck
And New York is the most beautiful city in the world? It is not far from it. No urban night is like the night there…. Squares after squares of flame, set up, and cut into the aether. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will.
– Ezra Pound
In New York, I have always felt lonely, the loneliness of the caged animal, which brings on crime, sex, alcohol, and other madnesses.
– Henry Miller
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
Quotes About New Yorkers
The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.
– John Updike
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
These streets will make you feel brand new. Big lights will inspire you.
– Alicia Keys and Jay-Z, Empire State of Mind
My favorite thing about New York is the people, because I think they’re misunderstood. I don’t think people realize how kind New York people are.
– Bill Murray
I’m from New York. I will kill to get what I need.
– Lady Gaga
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.
– James Baldwin
New Yorkers are born all over the country, and then they come to New York City and it hits them: Oh, that’s who I am.
– Delia Ephron
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
Yet, as only New Yorkers know, if you can get through the twilight, you’ll live through the night.
-Dorothy Parker
I believe in New Yorkers. Whether they’ve ever questioned the dream in which they live, I wouldn’t know, because I won’t ever dare ask that question.
– Dylan Thomas
Baby I’m from New York, concrete jungle where dreams are made of. There’s nothing you can’t do.
-Alicia Keys and Jay-Z, Empire State of Mind
Funny New York Quotes
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
You haven’t lived until you died in New York.
– Alexander Woollcott
On a New York subway, you get fined for spitting, but you can throw up for nothing.
– Lewis Grizzard
Central Park is the grandiose symbol of the front yard each child in New York hasn’t got.
– Robert Benchley
I feel about New York as a child whose father is a bank robber. Not perfect, but I still love him.
– Woody Allen
Cities have sexes: London is a man, Paris a woman, and New York a well-adjusted transsexual.
– Angela Carter
The flag of New York City should be someone with four bags opening a door with their shoulder.
– Alex Baze
New York is the only city in the world where you can get run down on the sidewalk by a pedestrian.
– Russell Baker
New York, the nation’s thyroid gland.
– Christopher Morley
It’ll be a great place if they ever finish it.
– O. Henry
In Hollywood, actors learn to act from watching television. In New York, people learn to act by walking down the street.
– Sidney Lumet
Anytime four New Yorkers get into a cab together without arguing, a bank robbery has just taken place.
– Johnny Carson
There is no question that there is an unseen world. The problem is, how far is it from midtown and how late is it open?
– Woody Allen
New York is a different country. Maybe it ought to have a separate government. Everybody thinks differently, they just don’t know what the hell the rest of the United States is.
– Henry Ford
NYC Quotes About Life
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
Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book — and does.
– Groucho Marx
Times Square can’t shine as bright as you.
– Plain White T’s
People go to LA to ‘find themselves’, they come to New York to become someone new.
– Lindsey Kelk
I wake up every morning and say to myself, ‘Well, I’m still in New York’. Thank you, God.
– Ed Koch
Living in California adds ten years to a man’s life. And those extra ten years I’d like to spend in New York.
– Harry Ruby
I love that about New York: You just dress the way you want to dress and feel really comfortable because nobody is judging. You can just be yourself, and it’s perfectly normal.
– Henrik Lundquist
Most people are in New York because they need evidence—in large quantities—of human expressiveness; and they need it not now and then, but every day. That is what they need. Those who go off to the manageable cities can do without; those who come to New York cannot.
– Vivian Gornick
If you’re greedy for life, that’s what New York is all about. If you’re trying to get as much as you can every day, this city is the place to be.
– Pam Nelson
It’s pretty cliched, but Times Square is just incredible. You really feel like you’re in the capital of the world.
– Timothy F. Cahill
New York is made up of millions of different people, and they all come here looking for something.
– Lindsey Kelk
One belongs to New York instantly, one belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years.
– Tom Wolfe
Sometimes I feel like my only friend, is the city I live in, is beautiful Brooklyn.
– Mos Def
Short Quotes About New York
New York is a sucked orange.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
For me, New York is comfortable, not strange.
– Karl Lagerfeld
New York is appalling, fantastically charmless, and elaborately dire.
– Henry James
‘New York!’ he said. ‘That’s not a place, it’s a dream.’
– Ralph Ellison
One can’t paint New York as it is, but rather as it is felt.
– Georgia O’Keeffe
Welcome to New York. It’s been waiting for you.
– Taylor Swift
New York is not a city – it’s a world.
– Iman
Everybody ought to have a lower East Side in their life.
– Irving Berlin
New York had all the iridescence of the beginning of the world.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
In New York, you’ve got to have all the luck.
– Charles Bukowski
New York is the only real city-city.
– Truman Capote
If London is a watercolor, New York is an oil painting.
– Peter Shaffer
Anything is possible. This is New York.
– Carrie Bradshaw
Somewhere between living and dreaming, there’s New York.
– Unknown
There is something in the New York air that makes sleep useless.
– Simone de Beauvoir
A bad day in New York City is still better than a good day anywhere else.
– Unknown
Things always change and New York teaches you that.
– Richard Hell
NYC Quotes for Instagram
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
Just a little apple wandering in the Big Apple.
– Unknown
I’m in a New York state of mind.
– Billy Joel
I want to be a part of it, New York, New York.
– Frank Sinatra
Anything is possible. This is New York.
– Carrie Bradshaw
The glamour of it all! New York! America!
– Charlie Chaplin
New York is really the place to be; to go to New York, you’re going to the centre of the world, the lion’s den.
– Zubin Mehta
I fell in love. His name is New York.
– Unknown
If you follow your heart just right, it will get you to New York City.
– Unknown
What’s the use of a great city having temptations if fellows don’t yield to them?
– P.G. Wodehouse
I was superstitious. Today was a Monday. I was born on Monday. It was a good day to arrive in New York City. No one expected me. Everything awaited me.
– Patti Smith
New York is a city that plays hard to get. You want me? You better work for it.
– Rony Vardi
New York to me, means the world.
– Donna Karan
When you leave New York you ain’t going anywhere.
– Jimmy Breslin
I love New York City…you’re never alone but you’re always on your own.
– Blair Waldorf
I knew I couldn’t live in America and I wasn’t ready to move to Europe so I moved to an island off the coast of America – New York City.
– Spalding Gray
I love New York. You can pop out of the Underworld in Central Park, hail a taxi, head down Fifth Avenue with a giant hellhound loping behind you, and nobody even looks at you funny.
– Rick Riordan
LAST UPDATED ON:
04/29/2023
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Christine is a woman with an eclectic range of artistic tastes. As a professional soprano with a Bachelor’s Degree in Music, she carries over 15 years of experience in the classical music scene, both locally and abroad. Her passion for music is equalled by her love for literature and, more recently, Christine graduated for a second time with a BA in English.