On telephone calls, Ms. Quinn can begin unexpected diatribes, her voice growing so loud that callers often have to hold their phones away from their ears.

“I couldn’t get a word in edgewise,” said one city official, who disagreed with the speaker over a piece of legislation, “so I just hung up.” (Ms. Quinn called back to extend her harangue.)

Ms. Quinn, who often publicly pokes fun at her own brassiness, is fully aware of her aggressive tendencies, once bragging in an interview that she could “open up the bitch tap and let the water run.” In an e-mail exchange with advocates, Ms. Quinn once offered a wry self-description: “control freak! Lol.”

“When I end up yelling, it’s not really deliberate,” Ms. Quinn said last week. “It’s usually out of some moment of passion or frustration or real desire to get unstuck.”

In the interview — which the speaker briefly interrupted to down an Advil with a swig of Starbucks coffee — Ms. Quinn offered no apology for her behavior, saying, “I am who I am.” But she also said she was working on becoming kinder and more measured. “Sometimes I try to give myself a beat or two before I say what I want to say,” she said.

Still, she signaled that modulation was not her top priority.

“At this point in my life, I’m not going to spend a lot of time focusing on dissatisfaction with who I am, and I’m not going to spend a lot of time tempering my personality,” Ms. Quinn said. “Whatever job I have next, I’m going to be somebody who wants to get things done.”

“I want to be a better Chris Quinn,” she added. “I don’t want to be a different Chris Quinn.”

Ms. Quinn is not the only mayoral candidate who has displayed a temper. One of the Republican candidates, Joseph J. Lhota, apologized last year after a board meeting at which he castigated a 77-year-old Holocaust survivor, challenging him to “be a man.”