O. Henry Quotes

In my case, I was stuck there for quite a while. New York is large enough to be a very abstract city, so nobody cares.

Reclusive? The inner city will secure your privacy better than any desert cave.

In a big city like L.A. you can spend a lot of time surrounded by hundreds of people yet you feel like an alien or a ghost or something.

When you go to the big city - you're in New York, Boston, you're in L.A. - you walk in the streets, and nobody says anything to you. It becomes so impersonal because there's so many people.

The city's full of people who you just see around.

Where I'm from, Toronto, is a big city.

The modern city consists of...dark, narrow streets full of gasoline fumes, coal dust, and toxic gasses, torn by the noise.

The City of New York is like an enormous citadel, a modern Carcassonne. Walking between the magnificent skyscrapers one feels the presence on the fringe of a howling, raging mob, a mob with empty bellies, a mob unshaven and in rags.

In small settlements everyone knows your affairs. In the city everyone does not-only those you choose to tell will know about you. This is one of the attributes of cities that is precious to most city people.

When I walk through the city, I just think that I see my family. I see us in everybody, you know? I see us.

What is the purpose of a city if not to grant the greatest of gifts, anonymity?

To live in a city is to be forever flinching.

[On living in New York City:] I'm oblivious to everything. I just don't notice anything. I sat in a coffee shop, drank half a cup of coffee before I noticed there was lipstick on the cup. There was wadded-up gum and lipstick on the napkin. I must have been sitting on that woman's lap for an hour.

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.

New York was a new and strange world. Vast, impersonal, merciless.... Always before I had felt like a person, an individual, hopeful that I could mold my life according to some desire of my own. But here in New York I was ignorant, insignificant, unimportant--one in millions whose destiny concerned no one. New York did not even know of my existence. Nor did it care.

There are two places in the world where men can most effectively disappear - the city of London and the South Seas.

I walk a lot in New York, not for the exercise but to get from place to place, and because it's the way of having the least contact with human beings.

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.

A great city is a great solitude.

In cities no one notices specific dying. Dying is a quality of the air. It's everywhere and nowhere.

I am a New Yorker. I like New York. And I like cities. And it's not my desire to make New York more suburban. I would personally just like to vet each person.

I love the city. I love the energy of New York and what happens here. But I'm very happy I don't live in the city on a daily basis, because I really do spend a great deal of my time, when I'm not on the road, in my studio - everyday, everyday, everyday.

New York is a city of conversations overheard, of people at the next restaurant table (micrometers away) checking your watch, of people reading the stories in your newspaper on the subway train.

I stayed in L.A. long enough to get on my feet, and then I moved back to New York. The reason I moved here was that I don't feel warm outside of a city; it's too barren in the suburbs, and L.A. is a suburb. Here, it felt active.

in the big city nobody has time to make friends. The big city is a big solitude.