People are really talkative in New York. Someone always comes up to me and says ‚Hi‘ during the day.

If I read a book that impresses me, I have to take myself firmly by the hand, before I mix with other people; otherwise they would think my mind rather queer.

From what I’ve heard, Paris did a little bit more prep work as far as making bike lanes and all of that stuff. They really did it properly, which New York is getting to little by little.

When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.

‚This guy’s a clown! He’s just all talk!‘ I’ve heard that many times in my career. And then they’re sleeping in the middle of the octagon.

There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern.

I was born in New York in 1904.

For some reason I did something where I realized I could get a reaction. That was when I broke out of my shell at school, because I really didn’t have any friends or anything like that and I just kind of was going along, and then finally I did this zany thing, and all of a sudden I had tons of friends.

You find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.

You learn a lot about someone when you share a meal together.

Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book, and does.

I never lecture, not because I am shy or a bad speaker, but simply because I detest the sort of people who go to lectures and don’t want to meet them.

Work aside, we come to New York for the possibility of interaction and inspiration.

I come from Detroit where it’s rough and I’m not a smooth talker.

I want you to feel happy and enjoy the theatre of my life the way that I do. No matter what happens with my music and wherever I go – that heart of that glamorous girl in New York will never be gone.

I’m a people’s man – only the people matter.

Everybody likes a compliment.

Those people in New York are not gonna change me none.

If you can’t move and talk to people that you see, it’s not really my scene.

Good humor is one of the best articles of dress one can wear in society.

I’m not trying to take New York by storm. I just want to sneak in there, keep my head down, batten down the hatches and cook.

I have no problem if someone wants to hug me – if I know him!

I have more friends in New York than Paris.

To assert in any case that a man must be absolutely cut off from society because he is absolutely evil amounts to saying that society is absolutely good, and no-one in his right mind will believe this today.

‚Kitchen Confidential‘ wasn’t a cautionary or an expose. I wrote it as an entertainment for New York tri-state area line cooks and restaurant lifers, basically; I had no expectation that it would move as far west as Philadelphia.

It’s hard for me to grasp the concept of somebody being nervous when I’m talking to them.

I remember coming to New York in 1974 to do a play here called ‚Equis.‘ And I remember the first morning getting up and walking around the streets, and I thought, ‚I’m home.‘ I felt really at peace here.

My show ‚The Big House‘ was picked up; they flew me to New York. I’m about to step on stage to announce Kevin Hart’s ‚The Big House.‘ And a hand grabs my shoulder, ‚Kevin no, they just decided to cancel it.‘ It’s a serious smack-in-the-face business, and either you can take it, or you can’t.

There is an optical illusion about every person we meet.

An architect should live as little in cities as a painter. Send him to our hills, and let him study there what nature understands by a buttress, and what by a dome.

Nobody can write the life of a man but those who have eat and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him.

I think humans are just hard-wired to process people’s faces and understand meaning and expression at such a more granular level than other types of communication.

In London, you’ll be walking around and, ‚Oh, there’s the ground.‘ Every area of the city has a Premier League club. They all survive; they all exist with enough money, and that’s good.

We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will.

When you’re on the road and moving city to city, when someone isn’t there at the end of the night, you feel empty.

Women prefer to talk in twos, while men prefer to talk in threes.

I was performing in New York and my friends started to call me Gaga, they said I was very theatrical and they said, ‚You’re Gaga‘.

With all the travel we’re doing to cold-weather cities, your mind definitely starts to wander. It gets you away from the game. Even when you arrive in a city, you’re tempted to just sit in your hotel and rest. Sometimes it’s nice to just get out and walk around, to see what’s there.

People have a negative impression of New York that I don’t think is quite fair.

I came to New York to be a fine artist – that was my ambition.

It’s no secret that in New York during the last 30 years there has been a tragic exodus from the churches into materialism, secularism and humanism.

I think that more flow of information, the ability to stay connected to more people makes people more effective as people. And I mean, that’s true socially. It makes you have more fun, right. It feels better to be more connected to all these people. You have a richer life.

When I’m back in New York – and this is a terrible thing to complain about – I eat a lot more really, really good food than perhaps I’d like to. So many of my friends are really good chefs. It’s kind of like being in the Mafia.

I cycled when I was at high school, then reconnected with bikes in New York in the late ’70s. It was a good way of getting around the clubs and galleries of the Lower East Side and Soho.

Talking, it seemed to me, was the point of adult existence.

New York is definitely ready for the word of God.

At one time, you could sit on the Rue de la Paix in Paris or at the Habima Theater in Tel Aviv or in Medina and you could see a person come in, black, white, it didn’t matter. You said, ‚That’s an American‘ because there’s a readiness to smile and to talk to people.

I didn’t go to school for a full year until I was 12. In the summer I was a wild child in the woods, with no shoes, and in the fall it was back to the city, shoe shops and school.

Even in New York, there are a lot of very attractive girls pedaling around. That just happens to be one of the nice sights in our city, seeing a young woman on a bike.

If someone offers you a breath mint, accept it.

Girls talk to each other like men talk to each other. But girls have an eye for detail.

For me, New York is comfortable, not strange.

Physical contact is a human necessity.

Never be the only one, except, possibly, in your own home.

Remember that before ‚Roe v. Wade‘ was decided, there were four states that allowed abortion in the first trimester if that’s what the woman sought: New York, Hawaii, California, Alaska. Other states were shifting. And people were fighting over this issue in state legislatures.

Politeness is to human nature what warmth is to wax.

Listen to many, speak to a few.

I ride my bike almost every day here in New York. It’s getting safer to do so, but I do have to be fairly alert when riding on the streets as opposed to riding on the Hudson River bike path or similar protected lanes.

This City is what it is because our citizens are what they are.

It’s sometimes comical to hear the younger generation ask their peers to repeat themselves.

We’ve fallen into a trap of ever-widening orbits of contact, and there is a total disregard for the present moment.