Moby York Quotations

Musically, New York is a big influence on me. Walk down the street for five minutes and you'll hear homeless punk rockers, people playing Caribbean music and reggae, sacred Islamic music and Latino music, so many different types of music.

I remember New York in the '80s as a place with vacant lots that would eventually give over to nature. Weeds would grow up, squirrels would move in. That entropy is gone now. It's too expensive to let a vacant lot go natural.

I walk out my front door in New York and I'm out on the street and there are people everywhere. L.A. is so much more spread out, so it's really easy in L.A. to have a little more isolation and to just not see as many people.

As a New Yorker you can't help but be proud of the fact that so much music and culture started here. Punk rock, jazz, hip-hop and house music started here, George Gershwin debuted 'Rhapsody in Blue' here; the Velvet Underground are from New York.

I live in New York and I love hanging out in gay clubs, and a lot of my friends are gay. But, for better or for worse, I'm not gay.

For me, New York still ranks as the most beautiful and the most interesting city in the world. It is also the most varied in terms of the things it has to offer.

New York is such a competitive place; it tears people apart. People come here and, if they can't make it in the first month, they get torn apart and they have to go back to where they came from. I don't think that's terribly healthy.

Many of my friends back in New York and elsewhere have a glib or dismissive attitude toward Los Angeles. It's a place of strip malls and traffic and not much else, in their opinion.

I may be a lifelong 'downtowner,' but Central Park really is the most amazing and the most beautiful part of New York City.

For some reason New York is the epicentre for people who hate me. Maybe this is another reason why I left New York but I get more hatred directed towards me there than any other place.

When I was a drunk, New York was the greatest place in the world. You walk everywhere, everything is open until four in the morning, and people go to New York looking for debauchery.

I stopped drinking and realised New York still has a lot of charm, but it has become so bourgeois and affluent - and I can't really complain because I'm sort of bourgeois and affluent myself, but I like living in a place where artists and musicians and writers can actually pay the rent.

Here was long period on my life when I was very disappointed by the fact I wasn't gay. Because I grew up going to gay clubs, living in New York and LA, both very gay cities.

New York has inspired more remarkable music than any other city I can think of.

If I were to be really petulant, I would say New York is the one doing the betraying. Because the New York I fell in love with doesn't really exist anymore.

When I was growing up, I fetishised New York City. It was the land of Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, it was where Leonard Cohen wrote 'Chelsea Hotel', it was CBGBs and all the punk rock clubs. Artists and musicians lived there, and it was cheap and dangerous.

I find London really exciting but there's a lot of vicious success here. Like New York, there's a lot of incredibly successful people who feel incredibly entitled, perhaps justifiably, but I don't want to be around viciously entitled people.