Who does not know this line from Alicia Key’s Song: New York, concrete jungle where dreams are made of, These streets will make you feel brand new… Well indeed, that’s New York! From the Empire State Building to Times Square to the Statue of Liberty, New York has everything that can inspire.
[table “80” could not be loaded /]New York has been featured in hundreeds of movies, dealth with in hundreds of novels and covered extensively in articles and research.
Over the centuries, the city of New York has gone through all kind of transformations: from the postindustrial to the cultural transformation. But it has still given its citizens the gift of privacy and contemplation as E.B. white states:
On any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy.
New York is not made of one city and one kind of people, but of different cultures, identities and souls. The following quote of White gives us an idea how New York grew and has embraced its cosmopolitanism, but is also embraced by the million of individuals:
There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born here, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size and its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter — the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something…Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness; natives give it solidity and continuity; but the settlers give it passion.
Quotes About New York
One belongs to New York instantly, one belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years.
Tom Wolfe 
Make your mark in New York and you are a made man.
Mark Twain
There is something in the New York air that makes sleep useless.
Simone de Beauvoir
New York was a city where you could be frozen to death in the midst of a busy street and nobody would notice.
Bob Dylan
New York is a diamond iceberg floating in river water.
Truman Capote
Quite simply, I was in love with New York. I do not mean ‘love’ in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and you never love anyone quite that way again
Joan Didion
I think New York has evolved in my work just the way the city has.
Paul Auster
My favorite thing about New York is the people, because I think they’re misunderstood. I don’t think people realize how kind New York people are.
Bill Murray
Whoever is born in New York is ill-equipped to deal with any other city: all other cities seem, at best, a mistake, and, at worst, a fraud. No other city is so spitefully incoherent.
James Baldwin
As for New York City, it is a place apart. There is not its match in any other country in the world.
Pearl S. Buck 
Each neighborhood of the city appeared to be made of a different substance, each seemed to have a different air pressure, a different psychic weight: the bright lights and shuttered shops, the housing projects and luxury hotels, the fire escapes and city parks.
Teju Cole
Unlike Rome, New York has never learned the art of growing old by playing on all its pasts. Its present invents itself, from hour to hour, in the act of throwing away ist previous accomplishments and challenging the future.
Michel de Certeau
Cities have sexes: London is a man, Paris a woman, and New York a well-adjusted transsexual.
Angela Carter
No place epitomizes the American experience and the American spirit more than New York City.
Michael Bloomberg
The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.
John Updike
Cut off as I am, it is inevitable that I should sometimes feel like a shadow walking in a shadowy world. When this happens I ask to be taken to New York City. Always I return home weary but I have the comforting certainty that mankind is real flesh and I myself am not a dream.
Helen Keller
The thing that always attracted me to New York was the sense of being in a place where a lot of people had a lot of stories not unlike mine
Salman Rushdie 
New York is an ugly city, a dirty city. Its climate is a scandal, its politics are used to frighten children, its traffic is madness, its competition is murderous. But there is one thing about it: Once you have lived in New York and it has become your home, no place else is good enough.
John Steinbeck
Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book — and does.
Groucho Marx
This is the city of dreamers and time and again it’s the place where the greatest dream of all, the American dream, has been tested and has triumphed.
Michael Bloomberg
If I’d lived in Roman times, I’d have lived in Rome. Where else? Today America is the Roman Empire and New York is Rome itself.
John Lennon
New York is appalling, fantastically charmless and elaborately dire.
Henry James
And New York is the most beautiful city in the world? It is not far from it. No urban night is like the night there… Squares after squares of flame, set up and cut into the aether. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will.
Ezra Pound
I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York’s skyline.
Ayn Rand 
Everybody comes from somewhere else. Everyone’s got a Polish grandmother, some kind of metamorphosis in their family circumstances. That’s a very big thing – the experience of not living where you started. It changes you in all kinds of ways.
Salman Rushdie