New Yorkers Quotes

“We named the bar The Bar. "People will think we're ironic instead of creatively bankrupt," my sister reasoned.
Yes, we thought we were being clever New Yorkers - that the name was a joke no one else would really get, like we did. Not meta-get ... But our first customer, a gray-haired woman in bifocals and a pink jogging suit, said, "I like the name. Like in Breakfast at Tiffany's and Audrey Hepburn's cat was named Cat.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“Thank God for immigrants. They're the only ones who have any personality left. They still allow themselves emotions, judgments, and all those qualities that we are "evolving" past. I don't know what they're saying, but I can tell they're speaking honestly.”
― Colin Quinn, The Coloring Book: A Comedian Solves Race Relations in America

“Instead of shutting ourselves off in fear, becoming victims—part of the problem—we became a solution.”
― Cleo Coyle, Billionaire Blend

“At noon a huge crowd of retarded people came to visit Santa and passed me on my little island. These people were profoundly retarded. They were rolling their eyes and wagging their tongues and staggering toward Santa. It was a large group of retarded people and after watching them for a few minutes I could not begin to guess where the retarded people ended and the regular New Yorkers began.

Everyone looks retarded once you set your mind to it.”
― David Sedaris, Holidays on Ice

“Man with goatee. Man who looked like a Beatle. All the Beatles at once. Woman wearing newspaper hat. I'd grown used to how weird New Yorkers were, and I could fit them into types.”
― Olivia Sudjic, Sympathy

“The poor Indians that sold the isle of Manhattan for twenty-four bucks are the only real native New Yorkers.”
― A.D. Aliwat, In Limbo

“I am reminded that while New Yorkers say "standing on line," the rest of the English-speaking world says "standing in line.”
― Jeffrey Steingarten, It Must've Been Something I Ate: The Return of the Man Who Ate Everything

“The unspoken truth was that New Yorkers considered everyone in the world to be just a tad - well, more than just a tad, a lot more than a tad - old-fashioned compared with themselves.”
― Lynn Cullen, Mrs. Poe

“If she had had the money, she would have put herself through enough plastic surgery to look respectable again. She didn't understand women, like Betsy, who had the money and didn't want to. For the same reason, she would never live in one of the outer boroughs or in the suburbs, no matter how much more space she could get for how much less money. It said something about you that you could not stay in Manhattan, that you valued a few extra square feet over the chance to be close to art, literature and history. The six tall tumblers in her kitchen cabinet had come from Steuben Glass and cost $345 for the set. The green silk dress she was wearing had come from Brooks Brothers and cost $225 off the rack.”
― Jane Haddam, Somebody Else's Music

“He opened his laptop and showed me a picture of a “cozy” Greenwich Village apartment he’d found online. My dad, a born New Yorker, had told me stories of the Village, a lively network of cobblestone streets and jazz dives, coffee houses and folk clubs with no cover fee—and I felt a surge of light-headed ambition. “Though it’s kind of strange,” Justin continued, “there is no bathroom inside. Our toilet would be down a public hallway.”
― Aspen Matis, Your Blue Is Not My Blue: A Missing Person Memoir

“The people [in NY] may not be polite but when it counts they’re something better than polite - they’re kind.”
― Lena Dunham, Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's "Learned"

“If you ask my mother where she’s from, she’s 100 percent going to say she’s from the Kingdom of God, because she does not like to say that she’s from Ecuador, Ecuador being one of the few South American countries that has not especially outdone itself on the international stage—magical realism basically skipped over it, as did the military dictatorship craze of the 1970s and 1980s, plus there are no world-famous Ecuadorians to speak of other than the fool who housed Julian Assange at the embassy in London (the president) and Christina Aguilera’s father, who was a domestic abuser. If you ask my father where he is from, he will definitely say Ecuador because he is sentimental about the country for reasons he’s working out in therapy. But if you push them, I mean really push them, they’re both going to say they’re from New York. If you ask them if they feel American because you’re a little narc who wants to prove your blood runs red, white, and blue, they’re going to say No, we feel like New Yorkers. We really do, too.”
― Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, The Undocumented Americans

“You said it yourself: New York is rude. We'll give you the shirt off our backs and our last subway card swipe if you're lost, but step to us with wild accusations about things that aren't our fault and any one of us will go off on you.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The World We Make

“When things are going well, New Yorkers complain, when things are going badly, New Yorkers complain, and when things are fucked up beyond all reason, New Yorkers shut up and do whatever needs to be done.”
― David Boyne