Well,’ I said, ‘Paris is old, is many centuries. You feel, in Paris, all the time gone by. That isn’t what you feel in New York — ’He was smiling. I stopped.
‘What do you feel in New York?’ he asked.
‘Perhaps you feel,’ I told him, ‘all the time to come. There’s such power there, everything is in such movement. You can’t help wondering — I can’t help wondering — what it will all be like — many years from now.

There is never any ending to Paris and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other. We always returned to it no matter who we were or how it was changed or with what difficulties, or ease, it could be reached. Paris was always worth it and you received return for whatever you brought to it. But this is how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy.

Paris is a very graceful and beautiful city, almost too formal and sweet to the taste after the raw disorder of New York. Everything seems to have been planned with the purpose of forming a most harmonious whole, which certainly has been done.. .Every street here is alive with all sorts of conditions of people, priests, nuns, students, and always the little soldiers with wide red pants.

Every time I look down on this timeless town
Whether blue or gray be her skies.
Whether loud be her cheers or soft be her tears,
More and more do I realize:

I love Paris in the springtime.
I love Paris in the fall.
I love Paris in the winter when it drizzles,
I love Paris in the summer when it sizzles.

I love Paris every moment,
Every moment of the year.
I love Paris, why, oh why do I love Paris?
Because my love is near.

The old Paris is no more (the form of a city changes faster, alas! than a mortal's heart).

..but also for the person who is visiting Paris later in his life for the very first time, something unusual will happen.. ..then there appears for the man of age a light - a light in which he sees the dreamy images of his life transforming into more tangible and more solid forms. Because that city has created our modern culture, and the movements of life in most countries are just a reflex of those which are starting in France's capital. (translation from the original Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek)

Paris that eternal monstrous marvel … the city of a hundred-thousand novels … a living creature, the great courtesan whose face and heart and mind-boggling morals they know: “They” are the lovers of Paris.

He could not live again in Paris. It had seemed better then only because he had been younger, and had not yet known contentment.

Paris, a city of gaieties and pleasures, where four-fifths of the inhabitants die of grief.

But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there, not even poverty, nor sudden money, nor the moonlight, nor right and wrong nor the breathing of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight.

Paris, the cradle of our civilisation, the buckler of our public liberties, the teacher and guide of the national genius, Paris that may be made a mark for the imbecile hatred of a few rustic boors, but can never be downtrodden nor dishonoured.

...God knows, when spring comes to Paris the humbles mortal alive must feel that he dwells in paradise....it [is] the the intimacy with which his eye rests upon the scene. It [is] his Paris. A man does not need to be rich, nor even a citizen, to feel this way about Paris. Paris is filled with poor people - the proudest and filthiest lot of beggars that ever walked the earth... And yet they give the illusion of being at home. It is that which distinguishes the Parisian from all other metropolitan souls.

When I think of New York I have a very different feeling. New York makes even a rich man feel his unimportance. New York is cold, glisttering, malign. The buildings dominate. There is a sort of atomic frenzy to the activity going on; the more furious the pace, the more diminished the spirit...Nobody knows what it's all about. Nobody directs the energy. Stupendous. Bizarre. Baffling. A tremendous reactive urge, but absolutely uncoordinated.

I am old enough to have had many friends who spent the war years in Paris under German occupation, and now I read what I always knew to be true: for many, Paris 1940 to 1944 was a non-stop party.

I can't stand Paris. I hate the place. Full of people talking French, which is a thing I bar. It always seems to me so affected.