new-york-city

Part of why I love New York so deeply is exactly this elusiveness. This refusal to be caught is what allows it to carry such fantasy, mystery and myth, yet also be home. It is simultaneously no one's city and everyone's city.

If Los Angeles is a woman reclining billboard model and the San Fernando Valley is her teenybopper sister, then New York is their cousin. Her hair is dyed autumn or aubergine or Egyptian henna, depending on her mood. Her skin is pale as frost and she wears beautiful Jil Sander suits and Prada pumps on which she walks faster than a speeding taxi (when it is caught in rush hour, that is). Her lips are some unlikely shade of copper or violet, courtesy of her local MAC drag queen makeup consultant.

The great city of New York wields more of the destinies of this great nation that five times the population of any other portion of the country.

For a while this seemed to do the trick, and I felt that whatever contamination I had helped to spread, the boundaries I had helped to break, sprinkling flakes of myself all over the surface of New York like so much fish food, had been forgiven.

As for New York City, it is a place apart. There is not its match in any other country in the world.

Is a newspaper prints a sex crime, it's smut, but when The New York Times prints it, it's a sociological study.[Adolph S. Ochs - Publisher New York Times]

Wanting to leave communist Russia is all fine and well | Actually leaving the country is where you might run into a few setbacks. Obtaining a visa for a simple vacation outside the soviet block was a long and arduous process. To immigrate to a free society was about as easy as finding whiskey in a church.

Even before the letter he'd been divided: one part of him swanning with Jay Gatsby around an imaginary Gotham; the other part stolid and earthbound, nose to the deep fryer, in the stifling, sizzling South.

My one thought is to get out of New York, to experience something genuinely American.

No matter how tired I was, I always felt more awake when I walked.

The Jewish center on Kings Highway scheduled an interview at the local labor hall downtown for my father to meet one of their counselors in order to asses his skills and capabilities. When my father sat down with the fellow and asked all sorts of questions, his reply was a blank stare. Boris didn't understand a word. He did speak a little English | He knew two words, pipe and chair. So Boris did the smart thing. He kept saying pipe over and over. Whatever question, he simply replied... pipe. The counselor soon got the gist | Boris must be a plumber. He was handed a small slip of paper and was instructed to report to the address penciled on it at 6 am sharp the following day.

The most wonderful street in the universe is Broadway. It is a world within itself. High and low, rich and poor, pass along at a rate peculiar to New York, and positively bewildering to a stranger.

And yet, there will always be something essentially elsewhere about New York. It is a place that people come to precisely because it doesn't ever fully offer itself. It's intoxicating. Keeps you on your toes. Keeps you drinking coffee and keeps you walking.

When I had a look at the lights of Broadway by night, I said to my American friends : "What a glorious garden of wonders this would be, to any who was lucky enough to be unable to read

Mrs. Almond lived much farther up town, in an embryonic street with a high number__ region where the extension of the city began to assume a theoretic air, where poplars grew beside the pavement (when there was one), and mingled their shade with the steep roofs of desultory Dutch houses, and where pigs and chickens disported themselves in the gutter. These elements of rural picturesqueness have now wholly departed from New York street scenery; but they were to be found within the memory of middle-aged persons, in quarters which now would blush to be reminded of them.

New York had all the iridescence of the beginning of the world.

The Bronx? No Thonx!

A hundred times have I thought New York is a catastrophe, and fifty times : It is a beautiful catastrophe.