“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.”

Patti Smith

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“New York City is a place where one can weep on the sidewalk in perfect privacy.”

William Maxwell

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“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.”

Taylor Mead

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“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

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“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.”

Andy Warhol

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“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.”

Frances Trollope

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“So many interesting females in this deranged city.”

Mary Karr

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“I wish Manhattan condo towers could be required to have street frontage consisting of capsule micro-shops. The affordable retail slots would guarantee the rich folks upstairs interesting things to buy, interesting services, interesting food and drink, and constant market-driven turnover of same, while keeping the streetscape vital and allowing the city to do so many of the things cities do best.”

William Gibson

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“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

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“There’s something in the New York air that makes sleep useless.”

Simone de Beauvoir

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“Over a period of thirty years, I have occupied eight caves in New York, eight digs—four in the Village, one on Murray Hill, three in Turtle Bay. In New York, a citizen is likely to keep on the move, shopping for the perfect arrangement of rooms and vistas, changing his habitation according to fortune, whim, and need. And in every place he abandons he leaves something vital, it seems to me, and starts his new life somewhat less encrusted, like a lobster that has shed its skin and is for a time soft and vulnerable.”

E. B. White

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“It was exciting just to stand in front of the hallowed ground of Birdland that had been blessed by John Coltrane, or the Five Spot on St. Mark’s Place where Billie Holiday used to sing, where Eric Dolphy and Ornette Coleman opened the field of jazz like human can openers.”

Patti Smith

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“My most thrilling musical experience was in Time Square, over thirty years ago. There was a rehearsal hall around the Brill Building where all the rooms were divided into tiny spaces with just enough room to open the door. Inside was a spinet piano— cigarette burns, missing keys, old paint and no pedals. You go in and close the door and it’s so loud from other rehearsals you can’t really work—so you stop and listen and the goulash of music was thrilling. Scales on a clarinet, tango, light opera, sour string quartet, voice lessons, someone belting out ‘Everything’s Coming Up Roses,’ garage bands, and piano lessons. The floor was pulsing, the walls were thin. As if ten radios were on at the same time, in the same room. It was a train station of music with all the sounds milling around…for me it was heavenly.”

Tom Waits

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“Every one of us lives a life we did not expect to live. We begin with passions and dreams and with the basic conviction that all will turn out for the good, more or less. Some of it does turn out for the good. Most of it, though, is a startling combination of the unexpected and the inconceivable. Every door we walk through introduces us to a strange land, and then we set about seeing if this is a place where we can grow.
        For me, New York City has been the great opened door.”

Richard Goodman

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“I couldn’t be happier than I am in this apartment, with the sounds from Sixth Avenue constantly surprising me, never once repeating themselves.”

John Cage

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