Mary Tyler Moore Quotes

There is something in the New York air that makes sleep useless.

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.

Living in New York City, you have to keep trying to do a lot of things.

I've lived my entire life in New York, and it informs everything.

I walk down the street and people don't go, 'My God, there he is.' I lead as normal a life as you can lead in New York City.

I love New York. But the energy is so intense.

I love L.A. - don't get me wrong. But I miss everything about New York. I don't eat cheese, but I miss the smell of pizza in the city. I'm a really big fan of Latino food. I want to go back home and have some good arroz con pollo.

I come from New York. It's busy. It's populated. It's noisy. It's loud.

If I could live anywhere else in the world, I would probably want a place back in New York.

I like going to the matinee. I like taking my daughter there. It's just my favorite place in the world. I go there after auditions. I lived in New York City, I would go to the theater right after because it clears your mind.

New York is so unique, and you are not always encouraged to consider the people in the city your neighbors because of the fast pace and surface anonymity.

One time, I threw a candy wrapper on the street. I was with a friend who said to me, You just littered on the street! Don't you care about the environment? And I thought about it, and I said, You know what? This isn't the environment. This is New York City. New York City is not the environment. New York City is a giant piece of litter. Next to Mexico City, it's the shittiest piece of litter in the world. Just a pussy, runny, smokin', stinkin' piece of litter.

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.

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 siren south is well enough, but New York, at the beginning of March, is a hoyden we would not care to miss--a drafty wench, her temperature up and down, full of bold promises and dust in the eye.

New York City isn't Chuck E. Cheese. We don't have ball pits for the kids to play in. We have titty bars and crack.

One of those out-of-the-ordinary days that made sense of the slew of ordinary days. New York had a way of doing that. Every now and then the city shook its soul out. It assailed you with an image, or a day, or a crime, or a terror, or a beauty so difficult to wrap your mind around that you had to shake your head in disbelief.

[On living in New York City:] I'm oblivious to everything. I just don't notice anything. I sat in a coffee shop, drank half a cup of coffee before I noticed there was lipstick on the cup. There was wadded-up gum and lipstick on the napkin. I must have been sitting on that woman's lap for an hour.

In New York the acoustics are good for laughter, for life is all external, all action, no thought, no meditation, no dreaming, no reflection, only the exuberance of action.

In my case, I was stuck there for quite a while. New York is large enough to be a very abstract city, so nobody cares.

In New York there's a lot of interstitial spaces; spaces in between spaces, where you're changing, and New York gives you the anonymity to be who you want to be.

I like it here in New York. I like the idea of having to keep eyes in the back of your head all the time.

People had said to me New York is kind of cutthroat and people walk past you on the street. I find it the opposite. I find that people want to talk.

New York was a new and strange world. Vast, impersonal, merciless.... Always before I had felt like a person, an individual, hopeful that I could mold my life according to some desire of my own. But here in New York I was ignorant, insignificant, unimportant--one in millions whose destiny concerned no one. New York did not even know of my existence. Nor did it care.

In a pure anonymous encounter you find a world alive and full of character. In New York, the street adventures are incredible. There are a thousand stories in a single block. You see the stories in people's faces. You hear the songs immediately. Here, in Los Angeles, there are fewer characters because they are all inside automobiles.