From a conversation earlier I found the full text I was looking for (below the image)
One of the extraordinary things about life is the sort of places
it’s prepared to put up with living. Anywhere it can get some
kind of a grip, whether it’s the intoxicating seas of Santraginus
V, where the fish never seem to care whatever the heck kind
of direction they swim in, the fire storms of Frastra where, they
say, life begins at 40,000 degrees, or just burrowing around in
the lower intestine of a rat for the sheer unadulterated hell of
it, life will always find a way of hanging on in somewhere.
It will even live in New York, though it’s hard to know why.
In the winter time the temperature falls well below the legal
minimum, or rather it would do if anybody had the common
sense to set a legal minimum. The last time anybody made a
list of the top hundred character attributes of New Yorkers,
common sense snuck in at number 79.
In the summer it’s too darn hot. It’s one thing to be the sort
of life form that thrives on heat and finds, as the Frastrans do,
that the temperature range between 40,000 and 40,004 is very
equable, but it’s quite another to be the sort of animal that has
to wrap itself up in lots of other animals at one point in your
planet’s orbit, and then find, half an orbit later, that your skin’s
bubbling.
Spring is over-rated. A lot of the inhabitants of New York
will honk on mightily about the pleasures of spring, but if they
actually knew the first thing about the pleasures of spring they
would know of at least five thousand nine hundred and eighty-
three better places to spend it than New York, and that’s just
on the same latitude.
Fall, though, is the worst. Few things are worse than fall in
New York. Some of the things that live in the lower intestines of
rats would disagree, but most of the things that live in the lower
intestines of rats are highly disagreeable anyway, so their opinion
can and should be discounted. When it’s fall in New York, the air
smells as if someone’s been frying goats in it, and if you are keen
to breathe, the best plan is to open a window and stick your head
in a building.
IF you want to read the rest of this excellent book (in a horrible format) go here