Jerzy Kosinski Quotes

I just had this New York thing. When I got there, I felt so at home. I said, 'This is where the crazy people go.' It's OK to be yourself in New York. In L.A., it's difficult.

I've always loved New York; I've been visiting New York since 1996. People don't look at you like, 'What are you doing? What are you wearing?' There is also that thing that when people know that you have worked hard to get something, people have that respect for that here. You worked hard - good for you.

In New York, Kid Carter was pure vanilla for a city with stronger tastes.

I've driven all through America and I know there are a lot of clever people between the coasts. But they have a slightly old-fashioned view of the world. Whereas New York is one of the most multicultural, multiracial, tolerant places on Earth.

I really love New York, and I've lived here for a long time. I know not just the different neighborhoods but the different kind of class cultures in New York from the up-and-coming, down-and-out kind of artist to the powerful worlds of finance.

New York has the biggest, most eclectic collection of people in the world.

In Los Angeles, I feel connected to a hubbub of strangeness. And I enjoy that; I like strangeness.

In New York, I feel like, anything goes.

In New York there's a lot of interstitial spaces; spaces in between spaces, where you're changing, and New York gives you the anonymity to be who you want to be.

I love New York. I love how integrated it is, how everybody lives together.

New York is at once cosmopolitan and parochial, a compendium of sentimental certainties. It is in fact the most sentimental of the world's great cities - in its self-congratulation a kind of San Francisco of the East.

There is something distinctive about living in New York; over eight million other people are doing it.

But in New York, it’s different—even uptown it’s really grand, and there’s no real segregation there. It’s all mixed up.

New York is so diverse. When you're on the street or in the subway, you're experiencing more of the diversity of New York.

New York remains what it has always been : a city of ebb and flow, a city of constant shifts of population and economics, a city of virtually no rest. It is harsh, dirty, and dangerous, it is whimsical and fanciful, it is beautiful and soaring - it is not one or another of these things but all of them, all at once, and to fail to accept this paradox is to deny the reality of city existence.

New York is such a diverse place in and of itself, it would be ridiculous to see it otherwise.

To be honest, I can live anywhere.

It was so interesting going to high school in New York. You get a callous to the city and an empathy for every type of person.

The good thing about being in San Francisco is it's a city that seems to have the flexibility and undefined boundaries.

URBANITY, n. The kind of civility that urban observers ascribe to dwellers in all cities but New York. Its commonest expression is heard in the words, "I beg your pardon," and it is not consistent with disregard of the rights of others.

I'm a kid from New York, so urban life reflected into art and music was around me and accessible and tangible.

New York. Truly, this is the only city that I feel this energy. Everyone is accepted. This is the first place that I felt open and that I can do everything.

In New York the acoustics are good for laughter, for life is all external, all action, no thought, no meditation, no dreaming, no reflection, only the exuberance of action.

New York is hard, cynical, ruthless, even beyond other cities. From their early repression its children emerge sophisticated, both stunted and overdeveloped, perverted, premature, forced by the artificiality of their environment.

New Yorkers are born all over the country, and then they come to New York City and it hits them: Oh, that’s who I am.