QUOTABLE NEW YORK: A Literary Companion ...

QUOTABLE NEW YORK: A Literary Companion edited by William Cole (Penguin: $6; 95 pp., illustrated). Probably no other city has inspired such extreme affection and hatred as New York, as this collection of quotes from Joan Didion and Russell Baker to Charles Dickens and Malcolm X demonstrates. Camus lamented, “So much bad taste hardly seems imaginable,” and Emerson dismissed the city as “a sucked orange.” But John Updike offered what may be the most telling comment when he described “the true New Yorker’s secret belief that people living anywhere else had to be, in some sense, kidding.”