Yorker Quotes & Sayings

I'm a New Yorker, and I rarely get to work at home. — Hope Davis

Like every New Yorker, I have a love/hate relationship with the city. There are times it's overbearing, but when I'm away even for a little while, I can't wait to get home. I am a New Yorker. — Dave Gahan

Helene Huntington Smith, "Profile," New Yorker, April 5, 1930. — Joseph P. Lash

Have so many merry little pots bubbling away in the fire of my enthusiasm: Myron, future trips, modern poetry, Yeats, Sitwell, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, villanelles, maybe Mlle, maybe The New Yorker or The Atlantic (poems sent out make blind hope spring eternal - even if rejections are immanent), spring: biking, breathing, sunning, tanning. All so lovely and potential. — Sylvia Plath

Chandler again: "I have never liked anyone who disliked cats, because I've always found an element of acute selfishness in their dispositions. — The New Yorker

When you live in New York, one of two things happen - you either become a New Yorker, or you feel more like the place you came from. — Al Franken

One question about a joke is, how well is the strangeness of the situation resolved? At 'The New Yorker', we retain a lot of incongruity, tapping the playful part of the mind - Monty Python-type stuff. We also try to use humor as a vehicle for communicating ideas. Not editorial comment, but observation. — Robert Mankoff

I am a New Yorker, one; I'm an artist, two; I'm a woman, three. — Laurie Anderson

I never studied art, but taught myself to draw by imitating the New Yorker cartoonists of that day, instead of doing my homework. — Bil Keane

I think in terms of being a New Yorker, as my friends would say, I don't take a lot of mess. I have no tolerance for people who are not thinking deeply about things. I have no tolerance for the kind of small talk that people need to fill silence. And I have no tolerance for people just not being a part of the world and being in it and trying to change it. — Jacqueline Woodson

I placed some of the DNA on the ends of my fingers and rubbed them together. The stuff was sticky. It began to dissolve on my skin. 'It's melting
like cotton candy.'
'Sure. That's the sugar in the DNA,' Smith said.
'Would it taste sweet?'
'No. DNA is an acid, and it's got salts in it. Actually, I've never tasted it.'
Later, I got some dried calf DNA. I placed a bit of the fluff on my tongue. It melted into a gluey ooze that stuck to the roof of my mouth in a blob. The blob felt slippery on my tongue, and the taste of pure DNA appeared. It had a soft taste, unsweet, rather bland, with a touch of acid and a hint of salt. Perhaps like the earth's primordial sea. It faded away.
Page 67, in Richard Preston's biographical essay on Craig Venter, "The Genome Warrior" (originally published in The New Yorker in 2000). — Timothy Ferris

Malcolm Gladwell, the author and New Yorker writer, has suggested that as a society we value natural, effortless accomplishment over achievement through effort. We endow our heroes with superhuman abilities that led them inevitably toward their greatness. — Carol S. Dweck

Part of my problem as a young writer was that I was too much a New Yorker, always second-guessing the 'market.' I became so discouraged that I decided to write something that would please me alone - that became my sole criterion. And that was when I wrote 'Forgetting Elena,' the first novel I got published. — Edmund White

I really feel now like a native New Yorker. And I'm very happy here. — Joan Collins

To every New Yorker - and to all those who believed in what I tried to stand for - I sincerely apologize. — Eliot Spitzer

We have a game we play when we're waiting for tables in restaurants, where you have to write the five things that describe yourself on a piece of paper. When I was [in my twenties], I would have put: ambitious, Wellesley graduate, daughter, Democrat, single. Ten years later not one of those five things turned up on my list. I was: journalist, feminist, New Yorker, divorced, funny. Today not one of those five things turns up in my list: writer, director, mother, sister, happy. — Nora Ephron

I've little in common with the scene in Silicon Valley and San Francisco. I'm a New Yorker. — Jon Oringer

Life is a campus: in a Greenwich Village bookstore, looking for a New Yorker collection, I asked of an earnest-looking assistant where I might find the humour section. Peering over her granny glasses, she enquired, Humour studies would that be, sir? — Keith Waterhouse

It's pretty crazy. I was thinking about that today, how 'True Blood' has penetrated so much of the cultural zeitgeist. It's truly amazing; it's incredible! The cover of 'Rolling Stone' is major. What's next, the cover of 'Vanity Fair?' When I'm in a 'New Yorker' cartoon, then I will feel like I have made it. — Denis O'Hare

After the New Yorker piece I decided that I would never give another interview to anyone on any subject and that I would keep away from all places where I would be likely to be interviewed. If you say nothing it is difficult for someone to get it wrong. — Ernest Hemingway,

I love the honesty of New Yorkers. When a New Yorker says 'let's do lunch,' they actually mean it. In L.A., when they say 'let's do lunch,' they're just trying to say good-bye. — Sherri Shepherd

Three months later - a Jewish girl having in the meantime explained the fundamentals of kosher dining - he returned to the B & H Dairy Bar, and when, finally, the old man asked him if he'd ever been in a restaurant, Jeff answered, "I don't know - you ever worked in one?" After that he was a New Yorker. Cruising — Jay McInerney

I still can't get over the idea that respectable adults now go to see superhero movies and that such films get reviewed in the 'New Yorker.' Clearly, I am seriously out of step with the times. — Chris Ware

One of the perks of being a 'New Yorker' cartoonist is that you get to hang around with interesting people. My fellow cartoonists are all interesting, and all highly creative. — Liza Donnelly

I still think of myself really as a New Yorker. — Parker Stevenson

Utter objectivity ... is not only impossible when judging literature, it's not exactly desirable. Fiction involves trace elements of magic; it works for reasons we can explain and also for reasons we can't. If novels or short-story collections could be weighed strictly in terms of their components (fully developed characters, check; original voice, check; solidly crafted structure, check; serious theme, check) they might satisfy, but they would fail to enchant. A great work of fiction involves a certain frisson that occurs when its various components cohere and then ignite.
(Source: "Letter from the Pulitzer Fiction Jury: What Really Happened This Year" in The New Yorker.) — Michael Cunningham

The brevity of our lives breeds a kind of temporal parochialism - an ignorance of or an indifference to those planetary gears which turn more slowly than our own. — Kathryn Schulz

The strangest part of being so well known is definitely getting a New Yorker profile. It's a wonderful, strange process, like seeing yourself through a distorting mirror. — Neil Gaiman

I see and write things first as an artist, second as a woman, and third as a New Yorker. All three have built-in perspectives that aren't neutral. — Laurie Anderson

My model, such as it is, is a mentorship model, which is to say that I care personally, and I involve myself personally/emotionally with the work of each student, and I try to make it such that they want to reach for more, do better, risk more, try new things, abandon limited objectives, individuate, and so on. For me it is personal, to the best of my ability, and it is about making more of the writer and of the writer's task in each case. I also think it's possible to do this, to teach in this way, in a classroom free of rancor and backbiting and competitive jostling. So: my class should be a place of peace, a place where anything is possible, where the code of realism is in disrepute, and the worst thing you can say, the absolutely verboten thing, is the phrase: The New Yorker. — Rick Moody

Outside the basement door was a covered pen that housed a rooster and a seagull. The rooster had been on his way to Colonel Sanders' when he fell off a truck and broke a drumstick. Someone called Carol, as people often do, and she took the rooster into her care. He was hard of moving, but she had hopes for him. He was so new there he did not even have a name. The seagull, on the other hand, had been with her for years. He had one wing. She had picked him up on a beach three hundred miles away. His name was Garbage Belly. --John McPhee, Travels in Georgia (1973) — David Remnick

As Adam Gopnik remarked in The New Yorker, "Post-modernist art is, above all, post-audience art." In — David Bayles

All the benefit that a New Yorker gets out of Kansas is no more than what he might get out of Saskatchewan, the Argentine pampas, of Siberia. But New York to a Kansan is not only a place where he may get drunk, look at dirty shows and buy bogus antiques; it is also a place where he may enforce his dunghill ideas upon his betters. — H.L. Mencken

I think many articles in the New Yorker have a strong point of view, but they are so rigorously fact-checked. I wouldn't call them objective, but they feel fair. — Alex Gibney

I said, to be a New Yorker you have to live here for six months, and if at the end of the six months you find you walk faster, talk faster, think faster, you're a New Yorker. — Ed Koch

One identity is as a television writer, which is very classically Southern California, but another of my personae is as a New Yorker cartoonist. — Bruce Eric Kaplan

I'm a native New Yorker. Everything to do with New York feels like my family. — Susan Sarandon

I'm a New Yorker; my oven is used for storage. — Cheyenne Jackson

There are few people who exemplify the ideals of opportunity, entrepreneurship and commitment to the collective good than the great New Yorker and the face of the $10 bill, Alexander Hamilton. — Eric Schneiderman

I'm constantly saying, 'I read a fascinating article in 'The New Yorker' ... ' I say it so often that sometimes I think I have nothing interesting to say myself, I merely regurgitate 'The New Yorker.' — Emma Donoghue

I'm a New Yorker. I was there during 9/11 and I saw how, not only New York City stopped for a moment, we all took an inhale and exhale at the same time - the world united at that time, and it changed my life. — Aisha Hinds

I've always believed that thoughtful people don't really take the tabloids seriously. They're basically a form of entertainment. I enjoy them as much as the next New Yorker. — Woody Allen

I think one of the best jobs in the universe must be being the editor of 'The New Yorker', but there are a number of magazines that I'd be excited to be the editor of. They would be 'Wired', 'The New Yorker' and probably, 'Vogue'. — Michael Wolf

Beware: I'm unafraid to host a big spoiler party--a novel that can be truly "spoiled" by the summary of its plot is a novel that was already spoiled by that plot. — James Wood

I think that most New Yorkers would object to calling me a New Yorker. I didn't grow up here. — Sloane Crosley

Activating is about changing people's perceptions of overlooked or invisible spaces. A building can become an archetype, invisible, like for a New Yorker, for example, the Statue of Liberty. You look at it, and it disappears into the thousands of times you've already seen it. — Chris Jordan

New York's my home. Born and raised. I'm a New Yorker to the bone. — Vanessa Ferlito

I always say I have a Danish passport, but I am a New Yorker at heart. — Nicolas Winding Refn

Toronto is a special city, and the environment is perfect for the arts; free and alive. I'm a New Yorker, and Toronto reminds me of a much cleaner New York, so it's like coming home after your mom just cleaned your room for you; for me that's a lovely environment. — Emory Cohen

You can come from China, Russia, any place, and you can be a New Yorker. You can say what you want to say here, really express yourself. — Rula Jebreal

If someone lives in New York, he's a New Yorker - they are entitled to the best medical system in the world. — George Pataki

My parents put the New Yorker in my crib. I saw Vogue and Vanity Fair around the house before I could read. — Richard Avedon

I think I'll be Scottish in every movie I write. They always try to talk me out of it, but Woody Allen is always a nebbish New Yorker. Why shouldn't I be a goofy Glaswegian? — Craig Ferguson

But there is a place where people like me live and love while fretting constantly about their own mortality and the fate of the universe. I know who I am now: I am a New Yorker. — Mara Wilson

I wanted to be a literary writer, so I wrote story after story and sent them to 'The New Yorker.' — Diane Mott Davidson

Media reporters have pointed out that the paragraphs in my Time column this week bear close similarities to paragraphs in Jill Lepore's essay in the April 22nd issue of The New Yorker. They are right. I made a terrible mistake. It is a serious lapse and one that is entirely my fault. I apologize unreservedly to her, to my editors at Time, and to my readers. — Fareed Zakaria

Most of the streets in Manhattan go in just one direction. Some of the larger crosstown streets and some of the major north - south avenues have two-way traffic, but in general, the odd-numbered streets go west, toward the Hudson River, and the "evens go east," as Jane, the native New Yorker, taught me. — Lauren Graham

I'm a New Yorker, and I jaywalk with the best of them. — Sonia Sotomayor

I'm a New Yorker; I've paid my dues. — Zoe Kravitz

Salary is no object: I want only enough to keep body and soul apart. — Dorothy Parker

'The New Yorker's fiction podcast I like a lot, where they have authors pick short stories by other authors that appeared in 'The New Yorker.' — Gillian Jacobs

I'll show Luke I can fit into the city. I'll show him I can be a true New Yorker. I'll go the gym, and then I'll eat a bagel, and I'll ... shoot someone, maybe?
Or maybe just the gym will be enough. — Sophie Kinsella

If you aren't born here, to be a real New Yorker, you have to bring your talent, be a successful mentor, and support the New Yorkers who made the city by giving back. — Daniel Boulud

I'm a New Yorker. I don't believe in air unless I can see it. — Jay Maisel

In the New Yorker library, I have long been shelved between Nadine Gordimer and Brendan Gill; an eerie little space nestled between high seriousness of purpose and legendary lightness of touch. — Adam Gopnik

Eleanor Gordon was the most sophisticated in their crowd. She read The New Yorker. — Judy Blume

I'm a New Yorker. I'm liberal and open-minded. Things don't really shock me. But I was reading the second-act today and thinking that if you're religious, you could be. But you shouldn't be! You can be extremely religious and have your faith and still be open-minded to art. Because this is art. That's part of the excitement. It literally is "The Jerry Springer Show" on-stage set to beautiful operatic music. That's what's so incredible about it! — Max Von Essen

It was actually an Israeli cartoonist, Nurit Karlin, who made me think that I could draw for 'The New Yorker.' I saw her work published in the magazine in the early 1970s - she was the only woman working as a cartoonist at 'The New Yorker' at the time. — Liza Donnelly

New York doesn't leave a lot of time for pondering forks in the road. People who have paused to gather their wits often find themselves suddenly waking up in a cookie-cutter beige apartment in Hoboken. I will not ever leave New York. I don't know how long it takes to become a true New Yorker, but I assume that if I die here ... that would qualify me. — Josh Kilmer-Purcell

Every man worships the dollar, and is down before his shrine from morning to night ... Other men, the world over, worship regularly at the shrine with matins and vespers, nones and complines, and whatever other daily services may be known to the religious houses; but the New Yorker is always on his knees. — Anthony Trollope

I always have issues. I'm a New Yorker. I always have issues with trust - you adopt it from being a New Yorker. I think trust is something that comes from the gut. I don't think it's anything specific. I don't think it's anything tangible. — Vin Diesel

In the high level cartoon world, my number one admired hero would be Chas Addams - really a top, top artist that the 'New Yorker' was lucky to find and employ. — Peter Beard

I'm never going to accomplish anything; that's perfectly clear to me. I'm never going to be famous. My name will never be writ large on the roster of Those Who Do Things. I don't do anything. Not one single thing. I used to bite my nails, but I don't even do that any more. — Dorothy Parker

I lived in New York City for a while and miss it like it's a person. Although I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, I'm a New Yorker at heart. A stroll through Central Park, a visit to the MET, a show on Broadway. There is no other city like it in the world! — Zoe McLellan

I mean, if you have any idea of any kind of complexity or immensity or destiny, of general order, you're put in a position of nothingness. And I think this is true. I don't think I'm anything; I never have thought that. Whatever it is that activates it is a certain kind of energy that goes on. But the effect is ridiculous; it's absurd."
--Lincoln Kirstein in "The New Yorker — Lincoln Kirstein

I've been a New Yorker for ten years, and the only people who are nice to us turn out to be Moonies. — P. J. O'Rourke

I'm aware of narrating certain experiences as they happen or obliterating those experiences with narrative and then those stories - not the experiences themselves - might become material for art. This kind of transformation shows up a lot in 10:04 because the book tracks the transposition of fact into fiction in the New Yorker stor — Ben Lerner

How could a New Yorker possibly take something called the Hollywood String Quartet seriously? — Leonard Slatkin

Writing helped to have jobs that involved running around, pushing things like dish carts and wheelbarrows. It would be hard to sit at a desk all day, and then come to sit at another desk. Also, it helps to abandon hope. If I sit at my computer, determined to write a New Yorker story I won't get beyond the first sentence. It's better to put no pressure on it. What would happen if I followed the previous sentence with this one, I'll think. If the eighth draft is torture, the first should be fun. At least if you're writing humor. — David Sedaris

It is in the nature of the New Yorker to be as topical as possible, on a level that is often small in scale and playful in intention. — Brendan Gill

I feel like my 50 years at Harvard were an interlude. I'm really a New Yorker. — Alan Dershowitz

A typical native New Yorker, I'm prone to wearing the city's unofficial sartorial color: black. — Amanda Hearst

A part of me is a liberal New Yorker involved in politics and certain attitudes about movies. I kind of lost my indie credibility over 'Mr. and Mrs. Smith.' I know I haven't lost it. I just have to go make an independent movie. I just have to do it. Just for me. — Doug Liman

There are pleasures to be had from books beyond being lightly entertained. There is the pleasure of being challenged; the pleasure of feeling one's range and capacities expanding; the pleasure of entering into an unfamiliar world, and being led into empathy with a consciousness very different from one's own; the pleasure of knowing what others have already thought it worth knowing, and entering a larger conversation. (The New Yorker, 13 Aug 2014) — Rebecca Mead

I have never been prouder to be a lifelong New Yorker than I am today with the passage of marriage equality. — Cyndi Lauper

Besides, he knew something that Chuck Percy, ABC News, the New Yorker, the New York Times, and even the President of the United States did not know: a new conservative-movement political machine was humming just beneath the Establishment's radar in North Carolina, ready to rewire what people thought they knew about how American politics worked. THE — Rick Perlstein

I don't profess any religion; I don't think it's possible that there is a God; I have the greatest difficulty in understanding what is meant by the words 'spiritual' or 'spirituality.'

[Interview, The New Yorker, Dec. 26, 2005] — Philip Pullman

A Michigander can be every bit as prickly as a New Yorker, just not out loud. The Midwesterner's credo: keep it to yourself. — James Hynes

Eventually, my highbrow parents, who so hated the Eisenhower suburban culture of the 1950s that the only magazines they subscribed to were 'The Atlantic' and 'The New Yorker,' broke down and got 'Life' magazine. — Sally Mann

The older I get the more grateful I am not to be told how everything comes out. — Mavis Gallant

Even in the pages of the New York Times and The New Yorker, it seems the epithet 'virtuous,' when applied to an act of personal environmental responsibility, may be used only ironically. Tell me: How did it come to pass that virtue - a quality that for most of history has generally been deemed, well, a virtue - become a mark of liberal softheadedness? How peculiar, that doing the right thing by the environment - buying the hybrid, eating like a locavore - should now set you up for the Ed Begley Jr. treatment. — Michael Pollan

Trying every day to tell the truth is hard. There are harder things, of course - arguably, living with lies and meaninglessness, living in despair is harder, but it's hardship disguised as luxury and easier perhaps to grow accustomed to, since truth is usually the enemy of custom. There are harder things than writing, being President Obama, for instance, and having to deal with House Republicans, or trying to fix the leak at the Fukushima reactor, these are harder, but writing is hard. — Tony Kushner

It required an enormous amount of energy and time just to do errands like getting groceries. She was always sweaty after she got groceries. — Stephanie Clifford

General literature without the humbug," was the New Yorker's original mission. — Harold Holzer

I started out a die-hard New Yorker but really grew to love working in Los Angeles. Even though I originally wanted to do theater, TV presented more opportunities for me, which led me out west. — Becki Newton

Blitz to V-E Day. After the war was over, the novelist John Hersey invented a new kind of journalism, modelled on the techniques of fiction, in his report about the atomic-bomb attack on Hiroshima, which filled an entire issue of the magazine in the summer of 1946. That June, Ross wrote to Flanner, with a touch of rue, "Probably the magazine will never get back to where it was." The war took The New Yorker out of the city and into the world. — Anonymous

I am a New Yorker, and 7:00 A.M. is a civilized hour to finish the day, not to start it. — Sonia Sotomayor

New Jersey. If there's anyone more purely foolish than a New Yorker, it's a fellow from New Jersey. — Stephen King

I'm not the girl who swings from the chandeliers and screws men because she can, fixing her lipstick in the rear view mirror of a cab hailed at dawn. I'm the girl you call Wednesday for Saturday. The girl who reads Milton for fun and knows a fish fork when she sees one. A flirt maybe, but in that harmless, nineteenth-century, kiss-my-hand-and-ask-me-to-waltz kind of way. Mostly, I'm a thinker, a worrier. Since I'm a New Yorker, you can take that last bit up a notch. It's not that there's no free spirit in me. But it's a free spirit with a five-year plan. — Elizabeth Bard

Narrative secrets are not the same as human mysteries, a lesson that novelists seem fates to forget, again and again; the former quickly confess themselves, and fall silent, while the true mysteries go on speaking. — James Wood