(Of London) The attitude to foreigners is like the attitude to dogs: Dogs are neither human nor British, but so long as you keep them under control, give them their exercise, feed them, pat them, you will find their wild emotions are amusing, and their characters interesting. V S Pritchett
London landladies are Britannias armed with helmet, shield, trident, and have faces with the word ‘No’ stamped like a coat of arms on them. V S Pritchett
Cities have sexes: London is a man, Paris a woman, and New York a well-adjusted transsexual. Angela Carter
London … remains a man’s city where New York is chiefly a woman’s. London has whole streets that cater to men’s wants. It has its great solid phalanx of fortress clubs. Louis Kronenberger
London is a modern Babylon. Benjamin Disraeli
London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
This melancholy London – I sometimes imagine that the souls of the lost are compelled to walk through its streets perpetually. One feels them passing like a whiff of air. William Butler Yeats
If London is a watercolor, New York is an oil painting. Peter Shaffer
The truth is, that in London it is always a sickly season. Nobody is healthy in London, nobody can be. Jane Austen
The marvelous maturity of London! I would rather be dead in this town than preening my feathers in heaven. Nicholas Monsarrat
You find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford. Samuel Johnson
London is the clearing-house of the world. Joseph Chamberlain
I’m leaving because the weather is too good. I hate London when it’s not raining. Groucho Marx
When it’s three o’clock in New York, it’s still 1938 in London. Bette Midler
In Paris, you learn wit, in London you learn to crush your social rivals, and in Florence you learn poise. Virgil Thomson