O. Henry Quotes

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.

The city is not a concrete jungle, it is a human zoo.

'High Cotton' is more conscious of class than 'Black Deutschland.'

New York City has 2 million rats. We used to have 8 million rats. Now we're down to 2 million. You know what that means? We lose four electoral votes.

The theater is a great equalizer: it is the only place where the poor can look down on the rich.

Class is the most difficult subject for American writers to deal with as it is the most difficult for the English to avoid.

You must never be afraid in New York City, because then you will call bad stuff to you and you will not like it there.

I just love building buildings. I'm the largest developer in New York City. I'm having a lot of fun doing it. I think I've never had more fun. I'm just enjoying my life.

Britain's is traditionally a rigid class society.

I live in New York City. I could never live anywhere else. The events of September 11 forced me to confront the fact that no matter what, I live here and always will. One of my favorite things about New York is that you can pick up the phone and order anything and someone will deliver it to you. Once I lived for a year in another city, and almost every waking hour of my life was spent going to stores, buying things, loading them into the car, bringing them home, unloading them, and carrying them into the house. How anyone gets anything done in these places is a mystery to me.

In future we'll have a different type of rich and poor.

I first did stand-up when I was 17, and then I passed out fliers for a comedy club (in New York City) and I got onstage whenever I could. And musical theater went out the window as soon as I started doing stand-up.

Oh, princes thrive on caviar, the poor on whey and curds, / And politicians, I infer, must eat their windy words. / It's crusts that feed the virtuous, it's cake that comforts sinners, / But writers live on bread and praise at Literary Dinners.

None of us should be ashamed to speak of our class power or lack of it. Overcoming fear, even the fear of being immodest, and acting courageously to bring issues of class- especially radical standpoints – into the discourse of blackness is a gesture of militant defiance, one that runs counter to bourgeois insistence that we think of “money” in particular and class in general as private matters.

In New York, you are constantly faced with this very urgent decision that you have to make, about every twenty minutes...you have to decide, immediately, you have to go "Ohmigod. Do I look at the most beautiful woman in the world or the craziest guy in the world?"

The disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition is the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.

If you didn’t believe it before — and it’s easy to understand how you might have been sceptical on this point — if you didn’t believe it before, you can absolutely believe it now: New York City is the greatest city in the world.

I have never said that human society ought to be aristocratic, but a great deal more than that. What I have said, and still believe with ever-increasing conviction, is that human society is always, whether it will or no, aristocratic by its very essence, to the extreme that it is a society in the measure that it is aristocratic, and ceases to be such when it ceases to be aristocratic. Of course I am speaking now of society and not of the State.

The Beatles first appeared on our show on February 9, 1964, and I have never seen any scenes to compare with the bedlam that was occasioned by their debut. Broadway was jammed with people for almost eight blocks. They screamed, yelled, and stopped traffic. It was indescribable ... There has never been anything like it in show business, and the New York City police were very happy it didn't - and wouldn't - happen again.

New York was big enough and wide enough that it allowed for reasonably eccentric people like me to thrive. It was a perfect place for me.

I am not ashamed to use the word class. I will also plead guilty to another charge. The charge is that people belonging to my class think they're better than other people. You're damn right we're better. We're better because we do not shirk our obligations either to ourselves or to others. . . .we live by our lights, we die by our lights, and whoever the high gods may be, we'll look them in the eye without apology.

For most practical purposes Tarbean had two pieces: Waterside and Hillside. Waterside is where people are poor. That makes them beggars, thieves, and whores. Hillside is where people are rich. That makes them solicitors, politicians, and courtesans.

That's our mission: to clean and green New York City - one block at a time.

It's true that what you find in New York is something other than America. Only small towns and small countries are self-satisfied; a real capital goes beyond its borders.

...the mayor should not be advancing a policy that encourages [illegal] immigrants to think of New York City as their safe haven.