On New York As A Drug: New York is a dramatic city, and I think what always moved me about it is that it exudes the metaphor of reality, that is, when you are in it, you feel like you are living a real life for better or worse. If you become fatally a New Yorker and you have that heroin in your bloodstream, then when you leave New York, you feel a little unreal. It's not that New York is more real than other places, it's that it convinces you while you are in it that this is what reality is, that you are up against reality. On New York As An American City: New York is America's city, and New York is America's nightmare -- America's anti-city. It's obviously the preeminent city of the United States, but it so defines itself against the rest of the United States, and the rest of the United States so defines itself against it, and so there's no other analogy in the world for the relationship between a major city and the country . . . On What Makes A New Yorker: A New Yorker could be someone who can't live anywhere else, who is unfit to live anywhere else. A New Yorker could even be someone who does live somewhere else, but has been marked by the experience so that he or she always has an ironic or skeptical attitude toward the goodies of life. Native New Yorkers are characteristically New Yorker in an unconscious way. On Indifference: One of the things that New York does, is it breeds a kind of benign indifference. Everyone's always attacking the city because of what they call the "Kitty Genovese phenomenon": that you're indifferent to your fellows, and this is considered a sort of monstrous mutation in the history of mankind -- that too many people are put together. I think that indifference is a beautiful lesson, a lesson that we could all afford to learn. There are many, many things to which we should be indifferent, or it's not so terrible to be indifferent to, and I think that one of the things that New York is good at is that it doesn't inspire false caring, so that when you do care, you genuinely care. You don't always have to give lip service to caring. I myself find, when I walk the streets of New York, that sometimes I'm fascinated, sometimes I'm completely numb and neutral, its not doing a thing to me. Sometimes I even walk around reading a book -- I don't want to be stimulated. So I think that there are ways of engaging it, there are ways of turning away from it. There are so many possible Gestalts -- ways of looking at the city. And then there are those encounters which can be warm, or which can be terrible, because there are thousands -- millions of potential encounters.		A writer, essayist, novelist, and poet, Lopate is the author of several essay collections including, PORTRAIT OF MY BODY (1996, Doubleday), AGAINST JOIE DE VIVRE (1989, Simon & Schuster), BACHELORHOOD (1981, Little, Brown & Company), THE RUG MERCHANT (1987, Viking Penguin), and BEING WITH CHILDREN (1989, Simon & Schuster). The editor of WRITING NEW YORK (The Library of America) and THE ART OF THE ESSAY (Doubleday), he is a professor of English at Hofstra University and lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter.