David Letterman

• "New York now leads the world's great cities in the number of people around whom you shouldn't make a sudden move." - Late Show with David Letterman Feb. 9, 1984
• "Traffic signals in New York are just rough guidelines." - Late Show with David Letterman
• "A town so nice they named it twice." - Late show with David Letterman

Douglas Adams

• "The last time anybody made a list of the top hundred character attributes of New Yorkers, common sense snuck in at number 79." - "Mostly Harmless"

Fran Lebowitz

• "When you leave New York, you are astonished at how clean the rest of the world is. Clean is not enough." - Source: Rand Lindsly's Quotations.

Donna Summer

• "Sometimes I get bored riding down the beautiful streets of L.A. I know it sounds crazy, but I just want to go to New York and see people suffer." - Source: Rand Lindsly's Quotations.

Neil Simon

• "There are two million interesting people in New York and only seventy-eight in Los Angles." - Playboy Feb. 1979

Russell Baker

• "New York is the only city in the world where you can get deliberately run down on the sidewalk by a pedestrian." - Source: Rand Lindsly's Quotations.

Harry Hershfield

• "New York: where everyone mutinies but no one deserts." - Source: Rand Lindsly's Quotations.

Harry Ruby

• "Living in California adds ten years to a man's life. And those extra ten years I'd like to spent in New York." - Source: Rand Lindsly's Quotations.

Ayn Rand

• "That particular sense of sacred rapture men say they experience in contemplating nature- I've never received it from nature, only from. Buildings, Skyscrapers. I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York's skyline. The shapes and the thought that made them. The sky over New York and the will of man made visible. What other religion do we need? And then people tell me about pilgrimages to some dank pest-hole in a jungle where they go to do homage to a crumbling temple, to a leering stone monster with a pot belly, created by some leprous savage. Is it beauty and genius they want to see? Do they seek a sense of the sublime? Let them come to New York, stand on the shore of the Hudson, look and kneel. When I see the city from my window - no, I don't feel how small I am - but I feel that if a war came to threaten this, I would like to throw myself into space, over the city, and protect these buildings with my body."

Bill Hicks

• "People come up to me and say, 'you know, if you stopped smoking, you'd get your sense of smell back.' (pauses) I live in New York City, I don't want my sense of smell back. 'Is that urine? (sniffs) I think I smell a dead fella! Where's that coming fro— Look honey, a dead fella! I found him, thank God I quit smoking, I can find dead fellas in puddles of urine.' I love living in New York."

Adunis

• "New York is a woman, holding, according to history, a rag called liberty with one hand, and strangling the eart with the other." Syrian poet Ali Ahmad Said (pseudonym Adunis) in "The Funeral of New York".

Albert Camus

• "Manhattan. Sometimes from beyond the skyscrapers, across of thousands of high walls, the cry of a tugboat finds you in your insomnia in the middle of the night, and you remember that this desert of iron and cement is an island." Algerian-French author Albert Camus in "American Journals" (1978).

Paul Goldberger

• "New York remains what it has always been: a city of ebb and flow, a city of constant shifts of population and economics, a city of virtually no rest. It is harsh, dirty, and dangerous, it is whimsical and fanciful, it is beautiful and soaring, it is not one or another of these things but all of them, all at once, and to fail to accept this paradox is to deny the reality of city existence."

John Updike

• "The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding."

James Weldon Johnson

• New York City is the most fatally fascinating thing in America. She sits like a great witch at the gate of the country, showing her alluring white face, and hiding her crooked hands and feet under the folds of her wide garments,--constantly enticing thousands from far within, and tempting those who come from across the seas to go no farther. And all these become the victims of her caprice. Some she at once crushes beneath her cruel feet; others she condemns to a fate like that of galley slaves; a few she favors and fondles, riding them high on the bubbles of fortune; then with a sudden breath she blows the bubbles out and laughs mockingly as she watches them fall.

They Might Be Giants

'Cause everyone's my friend in New York City

And everything looks beautiful when you're young and pretty

The streets are paved with diamonds and there's just so much to see

But the best thing about New York City is you and me.

- New York City

U2

In New York freedom looks like too many choices

In New York I found a friend to drown out the other voices

Voices on the cell phone

Voices from home

Voices of the hard sell

Voices down the stairwell

In New York, just got a place in New York

- New York

Interpol

I had seven faces

thought I knew which one to wear

But I'm sick of spending these lonely nights

training myself not to care

the subway, she is a porno

and the pavements they are a mess

I know you've supported me for a long time

somehow I'm not impressed

New York Cares (got to be some more change in my life)

- NYC

Billy Joel

Me, I'm takin' a Greyhound

On the Hudson River line

I'm in a New York State of Mind

-New York State of Mind