The West Coast experience is soft and peripheral, New York is hard and concentrated. California is a small woman saying, “Fuck me.” New York is a large man saying, “Fuck you!

California is a queer place — in a way, it has turned its back on the world, and looks into the void Pacific. It is absolutely selfish, very empty, but not false, and at least, not full of false effort.

California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things better work here, because here, beneath the immense bleached sky,is where we run out of continent.

Well, California's a big State.
It ain't that big. The whole United States ain't that big. It ain't that big. It ain't big enough. There ain't room enough for you an' me, for your kind an' my kind, for rich and poor together all in one country, for thieves and honest men. For hunger and fat. Whyn't you go back where you come from?

I'll tell ya, in New York City, where I've lived far too long, 'fuck' isn't even a word, it's a comma.

I feel compelled to say fuck you fuck you to those of you who have absolutely no regard for me as a person. You have raped me harder than you’ll ever know. So again I say fuck you although this phrase has totally lost its meaning. FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU.

East is East, and West is San Francisco, according to Californians. Californians are a race of people; they are not merely inhabitants of a State.

There is more sophistication and less sense in New York than anywhere else on the globe.

New York is a different country. Maybe it ought to have a separate government. Everybody thinks differently, they just don't know what the hell the rest of the United States is.

The girls in California were probably prettier in a standard sense than the New York girls — blonder and in better health, I guess; but I still preferred the way the girls in New York looked — stranger and more neurotic (a girl always looked more beautiful and fragile when she was about to have a nervous breakdown).

New York is a sucked orange.

"Attention to the meaning of the central male slang term for sexual intercourse — "fuck" — is instructive. To fuck a woman is to have sex with her. To fuck someone in another context… means to hurt or cheat a person. And when hurled as a simple insult (“fuck you”) the intent is denigration and the remark is often a prelude to violence or the threat of violence. Sex in patriarchy is fucking. That we live in a world in which people continue to use the same word for sex and violence, and then resist the notion that sex is routinely violent and claim to be outraged when sex becomes overtly violent, is testament to the power of patriarchy."

I think my exact words were "Fuck me!"

As for New York City, it is a place apart. There is not its match in any other country in the world.