Top 88 Harlem Quotes

It was a pretty rough neighborhood where I grew up The really tough places were over around Third Avenue where it ran into the Harlem River, but we weren’t far away.

I grew up in New York City: Harlem, New York. I played ball for probably two of the biggest amateur basketball organizations in the city.

I had a little portable typewriter. I call it my Harlem Literary Fellowship.

Growing up in Harlem, I was always in the parks playing ball.

The first painting I remember selling was ‘Panthera.’ I made it while I was in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the museum actually purchased it directly from me.

In the Bronx, you have the southern Italians; in Queens, the Greeks, Koreans and Chinese; in Brooklyn, the Jewish community; and in Harlem, the Hispanics – all with their own markets.

To me, Harlem is one of the most important places on the earth, particularly when it comes to talking about African Americans.

What makes Harlem special is that at any given time, food seekers can not only find food deeply rooted in Southern, Latin and African traditions, but also can taste the newer Senegalese, Chinese, and Italian influences as well.

Where I’m from in Harlem, everybody look like a rapper.

I used to live in the Bronx, then I lived uptown on 106th St. and Broadway, and finally I moved to Harlem right before it became gentrified. I lived on 120th St. between Fifth and Lenox Aves. in a little brownstone. I knew the neighborhood was changing when they started putting trees in the middle of the block.

Whether or not anybody had invented the category in his lifetime, Babe Ruth was surely the Greatest Living Yankee almost immediately upon lofting home runs at the Polo Grounds, allowing the Yankees to build their own palace across the Harlem River.

I grew up in Harlem in New York, very rough, urban environment, and so what I found is that, if I can have kids travel to different places, countries, areas, it can expand their minds.

When I go to America, I’m fortunate enough to stay in the nicer areas but the last time I went there – to New York last October, November – I went and explored. I went to the rough areas – to Brooklyn, Harlem, the Bronx; I walked around and you see it first-hand, what life is like out there.

Living at the YMCA in Harlem dramatically broadened my view of the world.

We can’t have Harlem become one borough for the rich.

I grew up in Harlem, and the kids used to tease me. You know that song ‘Bingo’? Well, they used to sing, ‘V-i-n-g-o, and Vingo was his name-o.’

With ‘Dope Walk,’ I wanted to bring back kids dancing and having fun again. That’s how it used to be in Harlem. I remember everybody Harlem-shaking and ‘Chicken Noodle Soup’-ing. Those were some of the most fun and memorable times in my life.

For me, growing up in Harlem and then migrating down to SoHo and the Lower East Side and chillin’ down there and making that my stomping ground… That was a big thing, because I’m from Harlem, and downtown is more artsy and also more open-minded. So I got the best of both worlds.

If you’ve ever been to Harlem, there’s always something playing on the street, and there’s this energy that feels different to anywhere else in New York.

I bought a house in the Hollywood Hills and brought my grandmother from Harlem to live in it with me.

I’m just a girl from Harlem who ended up in the right place at the right time.

Harlem is a very family-oriented neighborhood, and it always has been.

I was raised in Harlem. I never found a book that took place in Harlem. I never had a church like mine in a book. I never had people like the people I knew. People who could not find their lives in books and celebrated felt bad about themselves. I needed to write to include the lives of these young people.

I’ve always written about social concerns. My first book was about Spanish Harlem.

I credit a lot of my success to being from Harlem, growing up there.

Harlem exists in retrospect, in the memory of grandparents or elderly cousins, those ‘old-timers’ ever ready with their geysers of remembered scenes. The legends of ‘Black Mecca’ are preserved in the glossy musicals of Times Square and in texts of virtually every kind.

I went through various stages in my childhood, as we all do, various stages of obsessions with people and things. And I did. I wanted to be the first white Harlem Globetrotter.

When we did Diplomats music, it was all genuine, and I think that’s why people love it so much, because they seen a group of kids from Harlem that had almost nothing come up to be platinum-selling artists, and people rode that wave with us.

Harlem was an exciting place in the ’50s. There were nightclubs that, as a student of Columbia, you dashed off to. The community seemed very viable still.

Blacks commit murder eight times more per capita than any other group in our society. If I had put all of my police officers on Park Avenue and none in Harlem, thousands and thousands more blacks would’ve been killed during the eight years that I was mayor.

It is important to have permanent safe spaces in Harlem.

I was born in Harlem, raised in the South Bronx, went to public school, got out of public college, went into the Army, and then I just stuck with it.

We had the skirts with the slits up the side, sort of tough, sort of Spanish Harlem cool, but sweet too.

Honestly, what ‘Luke Cage’ is – it’s a hip-hop Western. And you have Luke Cage as the sheriff of Harlem.

Harlem’s streets lead backward, into history, straight to a work such as ‘This Was Harlem.’

Dance Theatre of Harlem has done a lot of good things well, a lot of good things badly, and a lot of bad things – it doesn’t matter how.

I was a teacher. I also worked at Harlem Children’s Zone. I moved back to Baltimore and opened up an after-school, out-of-school program on the west side and then worked in two public school districts, in Baltimore and Minneapolis.

In the imagination, Harlem will always be the spiritual capital of black excellence in America.

I say over and over again that I am just standing on the shoulders of so many who have set this path for me, and they may not be seen or recognized or have been given an opportunity to have a voice, but I’m here representing all of those dancers. Dance Theatre of Harlem Virginia Johnson, Tai Jimenez, Lauren Anderson.

I appreciate being able to give back to charities I care about such as the American Diabetes Association – my older sister passed away from diabetes – and Figure Skating in Harlem, which teaches young girls about confidence, focus and goal-setting.

Nonresidents have a tendency to rush their visits to Harlem.

After I’d been in college for a couple years I’d read Shakespeare and Frost and Chaucer and the poets of the Harlem Renaissance. I’d come to appreciate how gorgeous the English language could be. But most fantasy novels didn’t seem to make the effort.

I’m grateful for my health, glad I’m making people laugh, glad my wife still likes me after a lotta years, grateful my daughter is growing, glad I don’t take myself too seriously, glad L.A. has Astro Burger, grateful to be coming home to Harlem soon. It’s a gratitude list. It works.

Harlem is not a playground for rich bankers and consultants. It’s got students of all colors. It’s got old people who keep history and tell tall tales.

A lot of creativity coming from the east side of Harlem. It really built my character and who I am.

Harlem’s Apollo is probably the most well-known music hall in the world.

I would love to do an anthology show based on the character of Jesse B. Semple that Langston Hughes wrote about. He’s sort of a Forrest Gump character in the midst of 20th century Harlem.

One thing that drives me crazy is when people tell me that I sound good for an athlete. They be like, ‘You don’t sound like you from Harlem.’

Harlem is really a melting pot for a lot of different people. When you look at Harlem – and I lived there almost five years – most of the people who live in Harlem are transplants. They migrate to Harlem from another place.

Thinking back to boyhood days, I remember the bright sun on Harlem streets, the easy rhythms of black and brown bodies, the sounds of children streaming in and out of red brick tenements.

You know why Madison Avenue advertising has never done well in Harlem? We’re the only ones who know what it means to be Brand X.

It’s about stories. If I can tell the story to America, whether it’s Riesling or a boxer from Harlem, it will sell. I know on my gravestone it’s going to be, ‘Storyteller.’

In Harlem, Facebook was big. Kids would make Facebook ‘families,’ where they would change their last name on Facebook and have the same last name as their friends. I had this girl I was talking to, and she changed her last name to West, so I changed mine to West, too. It wasn’t until later that I took the ‘t’ off.

When I decided to go to art school, it wasn’t necessarily something I thought I needed. No one talked about graduate school when I was an undergrad. I went on to a residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and that transition from Yale to the Studio Museum, that was the real beginning of my professional career.