New York City
As soon as you move to New York, you kiss your tools goodbye.
“Peter Buchanan-Smith and the Urban Ax,” by Penelope Green, The New York Times, June 30, 2010.
Living in New York after Boston is like discovering that there is oxygen in the air—people to talk to, plays, opera, and something in the air that somehow makes people very different here from what they are in Boston.
Letter to Elizabeth Bishop, dated February 15, 1961, in Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 350-51.
In New York at the end of the day I play ostrich. I take a glass of beer or wine or a pill and go to sleep to have energy for the next day.
The Diary of Anaïs Nin (Vol 7, 1966–1974) (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), 53.
It snowed on Christmas night. We walked to Times Square to see the white billboard proclaiming WAR IS OVER! If you want it. Happy Christmas from John and Yoko.
Just Kids (New York: Ecco, 2010), 130.
New York City is a place where one can weep on the sidewalk in perfect privacy.
So Long, See You Tomorrow (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980), 131.
It was so important to have center places. Now, instead of five hundred artists there are fifty thousand in New York. There is no center. Max’s Kansas City was central to us.
The Paris Review Daily, Taylor Mead’s Lost East Village, by Craig Hubert, June 11, 2012.
I remember standing on a street corner with the black painter Beauford Delaney down in the Village, waiting for the light to change, and he pointed down and said, Look. I looked and all I saw was water. And he said, Look again, which I did, and I saw oil on the water and the city reflected in the puddle. It was a great revelation to me. I can’t explain it. He taught me how to see, and how to trust what I saw. Painters have often taught writers how to see. And once you’ve had that experience, you see differently.
“James Baldwin, The Art of Fiction No. 78,” Issue 91, The Paris Review, 1984.
It was the first time I ever saw people actually flying around the streets, it was so windy. Cabbed to Union Square ($3) and that’s where I really saw people in the air. If you were on the sunny side of the street it was nice, beautiful, but then when you’d hit a corner you’d get blown away. People were holding on to things. Went to the office. Stephen Mueller and Ronnie were finishing stretching Shadow paintings for my show next week.
Thursday, January 18, 1978 diary entry, The Andy Warhol Diaries (New York: Random House, 1991).
Nothing could be more beautiful than our passage down the Hudson… As we approached New York the burning heat of the day relaxed, and the long shadows of evening fell coolly on the beautiful villas we passed. I really can conceive nothing more exquisitely lovely than this approach to the city. The magnificent boldness of the Jersey shore on the one side, and the luxurious softness of the shady lawns on the other, with the vast silvery stream that flows between them, altogether form a picture which may well excuse a traveler for saying, once and again, that the Hudson river can be surpassed in beauty by none on the outside of Paradise.
Domestic Manners of the Americas (London: Whittaker, Treacher, & Co. 1832), 292.
So many interesting females in this deranged city.
Facebook status update, November 9, 2011.
I like to be in New York. Le Corbusier described it in the 1930s as a “wonderful catastrophe.” It is still a wonderful catastrophe, but inspiring. One thing I am crazy about is the seafood—the littleneck clams. I like them very much, at that place in Grand Central Station.
“Dieter Rams, Designer of Stereos, Shaves and Shelves,” The New York Times, May 11, 2011.
There’s something in the New York air that makes sleep useless.
January 29, 1947 entry, in America Day by Day, translated by Carol Cosman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 18.