Hemingway described literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other
My complaint, as an exile who once loved New York and who likes to return a half-dozen times a year, is not that it plays host to extremes of the human condition: There is grandeur in that, and necessity.
New York is, of course, many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left.
New York is a city with virtually no habitable public space - only private spaces expensively maintained within the general disaster.
In leaving New York in 1957, I did leave without regret the literary demimonde of agents and would-be's and with-it nonparticipants; this world seemed unnutritious and interfering.