Conversations with Czeslaw Milosz:

MILOSZ: Moscow doesn't have what Central Europe's looking for. It wants to look to the West, where it discovers a curious lack of any center, any single capital.

CZARNECKA: What about New York? Isn't that the new capital?

MILOSZ: English has ousted French, that's clear. But it's difficult to say to what degree New York has now become a center of the sort Paris once was. That strikes me as somewhat dubious. New York is not a metropolis in the way Paris was; America is a very decentralized country. And, as we know, New York is a very unique conglomeration. Paris was France, but New York is not a distillation of America.”