Greenwich Quotes

• My father took me back home, back to Greenwich Village, and he thought by taking me out of the orphanage he'd be out of the World War too. But no way - they got him anyway. He went in the Navy and then I lived on the streets.

  Gregory Corso

  Father, War, Home

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• I grew up in Greenwich Village. Dad was friends with John Lennon and Yoko Ono.

  Yancy Butler

  Dad, Village, Lennon

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• But in my imagination this whole thing developed and I started mixing up old folk songs with the Beatles beat and taking them down to Greenwich Village and playing them for the people there.

  Roger McGuinn

  Song, People, Imagination

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• My art teacher in junior high was a very out gay man and a mentor to me.

  Gus Van Sant

  Teacher, Art, Gay

  Interview with Tony Dushane, www.motherjones.com. December 5, 2008.

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• I got into a brawl one night in a saloon in Greenwich Village. Elia Kazan, a great director, saw me put out a couple of hecklers and figures there was some Big Daddy in me, just lyin' dormant. And out it came. People still do call me Big Daddy, but to me, inside, I'm no Big Daddy at all.

  Burl Ives

  Couple, Night, Daddy

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• I love walking around and grabbing coffee and sitting in a park and people watching… I love Greenwich Village.

  Joe Manganiello

  Coffee, People, Sitting

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• Hedge funds are investment pools that are relatively unconstrained in what they do. They are relatively unregulated (for now), charge very high fees, will not necessarily give you your money back when you want it, and will generally not tell you what they do. They are supposed to make money all the time, and when they fail at this, their investors redeem and go to someone else who has recently been making money. Every three or four years they deliver a one-in-a-hundred year flood. They are generally run for rich people in Geneva, Switzerland, by rich people in Greenwich, Connecticut.

  Cliff Asness

  Running, Years, People

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• Greenwich Village... the village of low rents and high arts.

  O. Henry

  Art, Village, Lows

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• A life lived in chaos is an impossibility for the artist. No matter how unstructured may seem the painter's garret in Paris or the poet's pad in Greenwich Village, the artist must have some kind of order or he will proudce a very small body of work. To create a work of art, great or small, is work, hard work, and work requires discipline and order.

  Madeleine L'Engle

  Art, Hard Work, Paris

  Madeleine L'Engle (2016). “Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art”, p.138, Convergent Books

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• So I played the acoustic guitar and harmonica and stomped my foot and I think I was right in assuming that Greenwich Village would be the best place to perform my own material and possibly get some attention, move on to making records and all.

  Steve Forbert

  Moving, Thinking, Feet

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• 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

  Funny, Humor, Glasses

  The Spectator, January 15, 1994.

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• Celebrated in the Bob Dylan ballad “Joey”, Crazy Joe Gallo was a charismatic beatnik gangster whose forays into Greenwich Village in the 1960s inspired his bloody revolution against the Mafia.

  Tom Folsom

  Crazy, Mafia, Village

  "Gangster Chic: Joey Gallo" by Tom Folsom, www.huffingtonpost.com. June 17, 2009.

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• These people, as far as I can see, do not congregate in the notorious centers of the movement, like the North Beach in San Francisco or Greenwich Village, or Venice, California.

  Alan Watts

  Beach, California, San Francisco

  Alan Watts (1997). “Zen & the Beat Way”, Tuttle Publishing

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• If the parks be "the lungs of London" we wonder what Greenwich Fair is--a periodical breaking out, we suppose--a sort of spring rash.

  Charles Dickens

  Spring, London, Parks

  Charles Dickens (1850). “Sketches by Boz [i.e. Charles Dickens] ... With a frontispiece by George Cruikshank”, p.67

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• Greenwich Village always had its share of mind readers, but there are many more these days, and they seem to have moved closer to the mainstream of life in the city. What was crazy 10 years ago is now respectable, even among the best-educated New Yorkers.

  Aravind Adiga

  Crazy, Years, Cities

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• Franz Kline, who became known for his black and white paintings, did a whole series of gorgeous landscapes and wonderful portraits that may still hang in Greenwich Village.

  David Amram

  Black And White, Portraits, Village

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• We're crazy about this city. First time we came here, we walked the streets all day, all over town and nobody hassled us. People smiled, friendly-like, and we knew we could live here. We'd like to keep our place in Greenwich Village and have an apartment here, God and the Immigration Service willing. Los Angeles? That's just a big parking lot where you buy a hamburger for the trip to San Francisco.

  John Lennon

  Crazy, Cities, San Francisco

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• I hired Bob at Terrytoons. He was my assistant animator, and then became an animator himself. He had just come from Boston with his family and was a brilliant draftsman as well as a great jazz guitarist. We had lots of fun nights in Greenwich Village together and then later hanging in LA. Bob worked on Fritz the Cat , Heavy Traffic , Coonskin , and on Wizards . I am terribly saddened by his passing and will miss him dearly.

  Ralph Bakshi

  Fun, Cat, Night

  FaceBook post by Ralph Bakshi from Dec 15, 2014

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• My look was even more solidified when I started singing in Greenwich Village with my sister Lucy. We wore matching dresses as the Simon Sisters.

  Carly Simon

  Sister, Singing, Dresses

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• I couldn't help but think, This car is taking me to a mental hospital and my mother is treating it like open-mic night at a Greenwich Village café.

  Augusten Burroughs

  Mother, Night, Thinking

  Augusten Burroughs (2010). “Running with Scissors: A Memoir”, p.132, St. Martin's Press

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• "What are you going to do?" "Can't say - run for president, write -" "Greenwich Village?" "Good heavens, no - I said write - not drink."

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Running, Writing, Heaven

  "This Side of Paradise". Book by F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1920.

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• Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village. downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I've been up all night, talking, talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles blues shout blind on the phonograph

  Allen Ginsberg

  Reading, Eye, Winter

  Allen Ginsberg, “Kaddish, Part I”

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• I regret profoundly that I was not an American and not born in Greenwich Village. It might be dying, and there might be a lot of dirt in the air you breathe, but this is where it's happening.

  John Lennon

  New York, Regret, Air

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• I'm not worried that tomorrow there will be a battalion outside your Greenwich Village apartment. I'm worried about things like the McCain Liberman bill that would define enemy belligerents so loosely it would include Americans, which is just like Stalin and Hitler and Mussolini.

  Naomi Wolf

  Enemy, Village, Bills

  "Naomi Wolf Thinks the Tea Parties Help Fight Fascism -- Is She Onto Something or in Fantasy Land?". Interview with Justine Sharrock, www.alternet.org. March 29, 2010.

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• I had wanted to come back to Greenwich Village ever since I had left Waverly Place, and since moving to West Eleventh Street, I have never lived anyplace else. I do not want to. That is not because of what the Village is but because of what I have made it, and what I have made it depends on who I am at the time.

  Mary Cantwell

  Happiness, Moving, Who I Am

  Mary Cantwell (1995). “Manhattan, when I was Young”, p.88, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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