The City Quotes

I talked with Quentin about where the character came from, and he told me Kansas City. I don't know how somebody talks from Kansas City, so I made him from New York.

It doesn't matter what you're trying to accomplish. It's all a matter of discipline. I was determined to discover what life held for me beyond the inner-city streets.

The seeds of civilization are in every culture, but it is city life that brings them to fruition.

City lights shine bright on my complexion, Self-reflection...red hairs flashing at the intersection. Life is a green light, one star, no script, Supporting actors...fresh peaches, no pit.

Be the best, not necessarily the original.

Ed Koch once said that New York City is where immigrants come to audition for America. That's what happened to my parents; that's what happened to me.

Incredible amounts of energy are hidden in your brain; enough in a gram of flesh to run the city of Chicago for 2 days. And you say you are tired?

Overall, white men run America. From nuclear armaments to the filth and jeopardy of New York City subways to the cruel mismanagement of health care, is there anything to boast about?

True New Yorkers do not really seek information about the outside world. They feel that if anything is not in New York it is not likely to be interesting.

But a city is more than a place in space, it is a drama in time.

As a remedy to life in society I would suggest the big city. Nowadays, it is the only desert within our means.

Every true New Yorker believes with all his heart that when a New Yorker is tired of New York, he is tired of life.

Everybody ought to have a lower East Side in their life.

Chicago is an October sort of city even in spring.

If you were smart in 1807 you moved to London, if you were smart in 1907 you moved to New York City, and if you are smart in 2007 you move to Asia.

My advice: Don't quit. When I got to New York City, I lived so far below the poverty line, because I didn't give in and get a job at 7-Eleven. I think you can thrive in misery.

The city needs a car like a fish needs a bicycle.

I screwed her over. I didn't want to see her screwed over by someone else.

The two elements the traveler first captures in the big city are extra human architecture and furious rhythm. Geometry and anguish.

Reality is a lovely place, but I wouldn't want to live there.

Growing up in New York City, I was always encouraged to question authority, and I think I confused patriotism with jingoism.

I was born in a slum, but the slum wasn't born in me.

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 .

You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now.

The only credential the city asked was the boldness to dream. For those who did, it unlocked its gates and its treasures, not caring who they were or where they came from.

Just one living cell in the human body is, more complex than New York City.

New York has closed itself off to the young and the struggling. But there are other cities. Detroit. Poughkeepsie. New York City has been taken away from you. So my advice is: Find a new city.

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

There is something in the New York air that makes sleep useless.

Yet, as only New Yorkers know, if you can get through the twilight, you'll live through the night.

I would like to use architecture to create bonds between people who live in cities, and even use it to recover the communities that used to exist in every single city.

City life is no life for a country man; for such a man that life is a kind of damnation in itself.

Today barbarism has taken over many city streets, or people fear it has, which comes to much the same thing in the end.

New York City is still the art capital - every time I'm in New York, I'm thinking about competition.

And it is always Easter Sunday at the New York City Ballet. It is always coming back to life. Not even coming back to life - it lives in the constant present.

I have an affection for a great city. I feel safe in the neighborhood of man, and enjoy the sweet security of the streets.

It’s fascinating. You know all these words, and they’re all English, but when you string them together into sentences, they just don’t make any sense.

You can't forget the things you did in the past, or you'll never learn from them.

You could name practically any problem in the hood and there'd be a rap song for you.

A middle finger is more New York than a corporate ambush. I bleed for my hometown, and I'd die for my fans.

We can revolutionize the attitude of inner city brown and black kids to learning. We need a civil rights movement within the African-American community.

Don't you love New York in the fall? It makes me want to buy school supplies. I would send you a bouquet of newly sharpened pencils if I knew your name and address.

What's the use of a great city having temptations if fellows don't yield to them?

I had lots of breaks. I guess the one that got my foot in the door was singing the National Anthem at the National Finals Rodeo in Oklahoma City in '74.

What is the city but the people?

Architecture is a slow business, and city planning even slower.

Manhattan is an accumulation of possible disasters that never happen.

I don't know if I want to go to New York. They'll have to pay me a lot more money because I like it here in Kansas City.

How'd you get Magnus to let Jace leave?" "Traded him for Alec," Clary said.

I'm pure at heart. It repels the dirt.