City Mentality Quotes

In New York, they like winners. They don't like second place.

New York is perhaps the only place in America where you feel at the centre and not at the margins, in the provinces, so for that reason I prefer its horror to this privileged beauty, its enslavement to the freedoms which remain local and privileged and very particularized, and which do not represent a genuine antithesis.

I really believe that you grow up a certain way in New York. There's a New York morality, a sense of loyalty. You know how to win and lose. There's a thousand kids outside, you know who to push and who not to push. There's a sixth sense you develop just because it's New York.

[ New York ] is a place that worships incompetence particularly if it's combined with energy and paranoid self-confidence. Only in a city like New York could Truman Capote have made it, or John Simon.

If there ever was an aviary overstocked with jays it is that Yaptown-on-the-Hudson, call New York. Cosmopolitan they call it, you bet. So's a piece of fly-paper. You listen close when they're buzzing and trying to pull their feet out of the sticky stuff. "Little old New York's good enough for us"--that's what they sing.

Yeah, I love living in New York, man, and people who live in New York, we wear that fact like a badge right on our sleeve because we know that fact impresses everybody! I was in Vietnam. So what? I live in New York!

This is New York, a combat zone, and everyone has to have an angle or they're not allowed over the bridges or through the tunnels. Let them have their angles, it's what they live for. You've got better things to worry about, like making sure the people that actually matter don't try any funny stuff.

I always give respect to and pay homage to New York, because I don't feel like I would be the player that I am today if it wasn't for New York City. It gives you a certain edge, a certain toughness just growing up in the city.

I've been living in New York City almost seven years, and my mentality has changed a lot. Just from being in New York this long and going across America, I realize that in New York, nobody really cares. They are just like, "We're New Yorkers." I feel like that is really the way it should be.

I really like to have a coffee shop next door and be able to smoke a cigarette. I'm a city person; I regard nature as something hostile and problematic. I do enjoy it when I get out there, but it is mostly against my will. It's a bit of an awkward thing to say - people really don't like it when you say that.