“Cities have sexes: London is a man, Paris a woman, and New York a well-adjusted transsexual.”

“London is satisfied, Paris is resigned, but New York is always hopeful. Always it believes that something good is about to come off, and it must hurry to meet it.”

“Seattle sucks. New York and Chicago are real cities. Seattle is Dubuque, Iowa, putting on airs. People here think Seattle is Paris… it ain't. I've been to Paris, and this place isn't Paris.”

“Instead of the poems I had hoped for, there came only a shuddering blackness and ineffable loneliness; and I saw at last a fearful truth which no one had ever dared to breathe before — the unwhisperable secret of secrets — The fact that this city of stone and stridor is not a sentient perpetuation of Old New York as London is of Old London and Paris of Old Paris, but that it is in fact quite dead, its sprawling body imperfectly embalmed and infested with queer animate things which have nothing to do with it as it was in life.”

“The city no longer exists except as a cultural ghost for tourists. Any highway eatery with its TV set, newspaper and magazine is as cosmopolitan as New York or Paris.”

“It is ridiculous to set a detective story in New York City. New York City is itself a detective story.”

“If London is a watercolor, New York is an oil painting.”

“New York, New York. Big city of dreams, but everything in New York ain't always what it seems.”

“America is a nation with no truly national city, no Paris, no Rome, no London, no city which is at once the social center, the political capital, and the financial hub.”

“New York is the perfect model of a city, not the model of a perfect city.”