Chicago's Quotes

#1. Chicago's such a great city because it's got so many different brilliantly architecturally looking buildings, and you can really modify that city.

Charles Roven

#2. I wish all high schools could offer students the outside activities that were available at the old Harrison High on Chicago's West Side in the late '20s. They enabled me to become part of a school newspaper, drama group, football team and student government.

Irv Kupcinet

#3. I haven't touched a piece of meat since I read a graphic description of Chicago's slaughterhouses when I was 12.

Christie Brinkley

#4. At one point during the Holmes investigation Chicago's chief of police told a Tribune reporter he'd just as soon have a squad of reporters under his command as detectives.

Erik Larson

#5. Chicago's privatization mania began during Mayor Richard M. Daley's administration, which ran from 1989 to 2011. Under his successor, Rahm Emanuel, the trend has continued apace. For Rahm's investment banker buddies, the trend has been a boon. For citizens? Not so much.

Rick Perlstein

#6. Today, as young French and Dutch Muslims wander through Upper Manhattan and Chicago's South Side, it's not uncommon to see European politicians, journalists, and activists in those same urban areas, visiting mosques and community centers trying to identify "best practices" they can take back home.

Hisham D. Aidi

#7. Chicago's buoy was a couple of hundred yards astern of Arizona, and I was saddened to look at her.

Jack Adams

#8. Chicago's like Melbourne - there's a city center, there's public transport, and there's more of a cultural scene.

Jesse Spencer

#9. Thanks to a deal finalized in 2008, Chicago's parking meters will be operated for the next 75 years by a group of investors put together by Morgan Stanley, including the sovereign wealth fund of Abu Dhabi.

Thomas Frank

#10. To have a strong community of people who believe in your potential can make all the difference in the world. So many people have invested in me and I want to do the same for Chicago's teens.

Derrick Rose

#11. You'd never think of taking a cab if you had to walk a mile down Chicago's Michigan Avenue. But in a bad city you take a cab just to go around the corner.

Helmut Jahn

#12. I think it's so dope that I'm here in Chicago and contributing to the music scene that's thriving. People are so happy Chicago's shining that everyone is willing to say 'I represent Chicago.' That wasn't always the case.

Chance The Rapper

#13. Fans love Sosa for his exuberance, for the kisses he blows to his mother, wife and four children. He is Slammin' Sammy, a fairy-tale figure rising from poverty in the Dominican Republic to the 55th floor above Chicago's Lake Shore Drive.

Bill Dedman

#14. To romp along the connected rooftops and fire escapes of Chicago's second city of garages was my young life's passion.

Lynn Margulis

#15. I left the University of Chicago's creative writing program for a tenure-track job at DePauw University in Indiana, then left DePauw in 2010 for Los Angeles.

Nic Pizzolatto

#16. He was no stranger to brutal death. Both as sheriff and as a cop on Chicago's south side, he'd seen his share of dying. Murder, accident, overdose - it happened in many ways, but the end was the same. Something sad and confusing left behind. Only the shape of life, only the empty outline.

William Kent Krueger

#17. Blake Crouch, Chicago's deputy chief, and says, "I don't know." Crouch resembles a mole, with a long, sharp nose and tiny black eyes.

J.A. Konrath

#18. Chicago's always been known as this meat and potatoes place, and a lot of restaurants play that up. They try to outdo each other by adding another 10 ounces, so their 80 ounce steak becomes a 90 ounce steak with 10 pounds of mashed potatoes on the side.

Graham Elliot

#19. Expected a bit more skin, Almeida." She punctuated that with a pointed glance at the shorts area. The man had promised Speedos.
"Think Chicago's seen enough of me, don't you?"
Chicago might have, but Kinsey most definitely had not.

Kate Meader

#20. In the States, it takes you a lifetime just to get from Chicago's South Side to the West Side.

Luther Allison

#21. San Francisco has a flowers-in-your-hair kind of vibe, while Chicago's got this very funny, big-city/small-town coolness to it.

Dave Matthews

#22. The cafeteria in the Chicago's Children's Memorial Hospital basement was the saddest place in the world - and forever it shall be - with its grim neon lights and gray tabletops and the diffuse foreboding of those who stepped away from suffering children to have a grilled cheese sandwich.

Aleksandar Hemon

#23. I ignored the teasing tone of the man who stood beside me, the four-hundred-year-old Master vampire who ruled Chicago's Cadogan House and the parts of my heart that weren't devoted to great books and good pizza.

Chloe Neill

#24. Gacy came out with Gray and walked up to the officers. They had to meet Stevens at Di Leo's, a restaurant on Chicago's Northwest Side. Did the officers mind if Gray drove? They didn't, but they advised the youth to use caution. It

Terry Sullivan

#25. Where Chicago's vast and growing Negro population shifted and moved and stretched its great limbs ominously, reaching out and out in protest and overflowing the bounds that irked it. Her serene face and her quiet manner, her bland interest and friendly look protected her.

Edna Ferber

#26. A tall young man sped swiftly up the wide stone steps leading to the doorway of a mansion in one of Chicago's most fashionable avenues.

George Barr McCutcheon

#27. I began acting on stage when I was 7 years old. My first role was as Dorothy in 'The Wizard of Oz' at Chicago's Center on Deafness in Northbrook, Illinois.

Marlee Matlin

#28. I worked a lot in Chicago's theater scene as a fight choreographer. And so I do have a lot of experience in stage combat and also in Kabuki dance and Kabuki theater.

Nick Offerman

#29. Chicago's neighborhoods have always been this city's greatest strength.

Jane Byrne

#30. Was there ever a name more full of purpose than Chicago's? ... spoken as Chicagoans themselves speak it, with a bit of a spit to give heft to its slither, it is gloriously onomatopoetic.

Jan Morris

#31. One of the most exciting intellectual moments of my career was my 1948 discovery of Knut Wicksell's unknown and untranslated dissertation, 'Finanztheoretische Untersuchungen,' buried in the dusty stacks of Chicago's old Harper Library.

James M. Buchanan

#32. Chicago's one of the rare places where architecture is more visible.

Frank Gehry

#33. Reviewers said Ghost Country was rich, astonishing and affecting in the way it blended comedy, magic, and a gritty urban realism in a breathtaking ride along Chicago's mean streets.

Sara Paretsky

#34. It was a bright, clear afternoon in the late fall that pretty Miss Cable drove up in her trap and waited at the curb for her father to come forth from his office in one of Chicago's tallest buildings.

George Barr McCutcheon

#35. However, I was a restaurant critic at Chicago magazine before I worked at Esquire, and I've been a really enthusiastic home cook for a long time. It's just something I'm passionate about.

Ted Allen

#36. Chicago - this vicious, stinking zoo, this mean-grinning, Mace-smelling boneyard of a city; an elegant rockpile monument to everything cruel and stupid and corrupt in the human spirit.

Hunter S. Thompson

#37. I'm a huge fan of Chicago sports and Chicago food, and I love going home and my family is still there. I guess it's pretty easy to have a normal life in Chicago.

Matt Walsh

#38. It's basically taking a 911 call, bringing them on stage and dealing with it just like when I was a Chicago policeman for 12 years. I personally become involved. Where Jerry lets people tell their story and lets everything happen on stage, I kind of go after the bad guy and protect the little guy.

Steve Wilkos

#39. My mother, she worked in the mayor's office in Chicago when I was growing up and has been in democratic politics for a long time.

Graham Moore

#40. But I like being nasty. I like being cranky. Especially if it's a cold day in Chicago, it's nice to just take it out on Kyle, because he's so easy to scream at, you know?

Fisher Stevens

#41. My younger sister's a comedian. She has a sketch comedy group in Chicago called Schadenfreude and I look at her with such admiration and envy because it's such an amazing thing to make someone laugh.

Brian D'Arcy James

#42. I have a lot of fond memories of St. Patrick's Day in Chicago. Vague, but fond.

Joel Murray

#43. Anywhere in the world you hear a Chicago bluesman play, it's a Chicago sound born and bred.

Ralph Metcalfe

#44. When you're a Chicago artist, to play Lollapalooza, that's not a normal thing. It's artists on a path to a certain place that do that. Chief Keef did it; Kids These Days did it; Cool Kids did it. And I'm the next Cool-Kids-Chief, if you will.

Chance The Rapper

#45. The last human of importance the American people have been able to keep in the working end of their brain is your own Chicago triggerman, Dillinger. After him they kind of lost hold on keeping who's who straight. So don't be surprised if they don't remember who Cabot Wright is, or if they do.

James Purdy

#46. Kids in North Lawndale need not be confused about their prospects: Cook County's Juvenile Temporary Detention Center sits directly adjacent to the neighborhood.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

#47. Whether it's on the streets of Philadelphia or New York or Chicago or Atlanta or in a classroom in Newtown, Connecticut, people want to be safe.

Michael Nutter

#48. As an early-and-often chronicler of Chicago-on-the-Potomac, I am amazed at the stubborn and clingy persistence of President Barack Obama's snowblowers in the media. See no scandal, hear no scandal, speak no scandal.

Michelle Malkin

#49. I think what's important is to give space to the range of human experience.

Judy Chicago

#50. It's a crazy soprano, and singing as a man as a woman. But for many years, I was on the road in Chicago as Mary Sunshine, so I can do that. I didn't think there was any way I was going to get it - it was so far out of my comfort-zone.

Max Von Essen

#51. I love songs, and I love songwriting, and there's a standard of songwriting within Chicago blues in particular. I don't like the sad blues, necessarily; the Chicago blues is what I like, which is the kind of blues you can dance to.

Sinead O'Connor

#52. I love Chicago. It was an awesome place to grow up. It's a big city but it doesn't feel like one. I can't imagine that if I had kids I would raise them anywhere else besides Chicago.

Chris McCaughan

#53. I come from a working-class family in Pittsburgh, whereas 'Mike & Molly' deals with the working class in Chicago. I swear a little, but I pretty much talk the same. It's not like when you see someone like Tim Allen and he's a lot bluer onstage.

Billy Gardell

#54. Selling public property is the true Chicago way. Had Mr. Obama not been elected president, the nation's business journals would be falling over one another to praise his city for its daring, market-friendly innovations.

Thomas Frank

#55. In Chicago it's really a case of the play's the thing - people are just so happy to be acting, you know? We were all actors - not like in New York or Los Angeles, where everyone says they are actors but they are actually waiting tables and hustling for spots in commercials.

John C. Reilly

#56. I've been a Cub all my life. I came up here when I was 20 years old and spent my whole career here in Chicago. I've always been an optimist; I believe you have to be in order to survive, to be honest with you - in health, with what I've been through. That's the way I am.

Ron Santo

#57. Skating is big in Chicago. There's a lot of hockey; a lot of the boys play hockey. And figure skating is big.

Joan Cusack

#58. It's the place built out of Man's ceaseless failure to overcome himself. Out of Man's endless war against himself we build our successes as well as our failures. Making it the city of all cities most like Man himself - loneliest creation of all this very old poor earth.

Nelson Algren

#59. The farm is one field to the east of the railroad track that used to connect New Orleans with Chicago. The track runs beside Highway 45, an old U.S. route that unites Chicago with Mobile, Alabama.

Bobbie Ann Mason

#60. Every player should be accorded the privilege of at least one season with the Chicago Cubs. That's baseball as it should be played - in God's own sunshine. And that's really living.

Alvin Dark

#61. We don't have a full black community in Boston. Our people are scattered. There's a middle class where I live in Highland Park but it's not like a piece of Washington or Chicago.

Henry Hampton

#62. I look forward to going to Chicago because it's where I grew up, and the food there is so munch. Especially during the winter, I get deep dish pizza or Italian beef, and it warms me up. It's something I don't normally get, especially here in L.A. where you're always trying to be healthy.

Ron Funches

#63. I was a big and un-ironic fan of Dear Abby when I was a kid in Chicago. I think I sort of internalized her. So I have this inner Abby: cranky, proper, folksy yet scathing, with a beehive hairdo. But that's my issue.

George Saunders

#64. I'm a suburbanite nowIn L.A. you have to be so careful about what you say and who you trust. It's such an awful way to live. [In Chicago] people want to get to know you for you. I feel like I can just breathe.

Kristin Cavallari

#65. I love Chicago, but in a lot of ways it's a disappointment. You can work there for years and years, and because you're in Chicago, you don't get the recognition. It has some of the best theater in the country, but when they shoot a movie there, they bring in all their actors.

John Malkovich

#66. Economists at the National Bureau of Economic Research and University of Chicago persuasively argue that one of the biggest reasons for the nation's current obesity epidemic is that food is now so much cheaper and easier to prepare.

Charles Duhigg

#67. A good many preachers say I am lowering the pulpit. I am glad I am. I am trying to get it down to the level of men's hearts. If I wanted to hit Chicago I would not put the cannon on the top of this building and fire into the air. Too many preachers fire into the air.

Dwight L. Moody

#68. It takes one a long time to become young. - Picasso

Patsy Asuncion

#69. She leaned in, a tip she had read today on HuffPo's Love & Sex section. Boobs out, smile wide, voice low.
Being sexy was exhausting.

Kate Meader

#70. North Lawndale's Jewish People's Institute actively encouraged blacks to move into the neighborhood, seeking to make it a 'pilot community for interracial living.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

#71. A lot of people who voted for Barack Obama expected and were led to expect something new in politics: a new tone of political discourse in Washington. And I think - I think they're disappointed, because Barack Obama is not a new kind of politician. In fact, he's an old Chicago politician.

Bernard Goldberg

#72. Jack: Well, I've never been to New York, but I hear it's for assholes.
Odile: It's not.
Jack: Well, that's what I heard. Cool people don't live there anymore, They all live here. In Chicago.

Joe Meno

#73. When Chinese get together - what's buried stays buried. We don't even discuss our embarrassing early days struggling in Chicago.

Anchee Min

#74. My family background is Mexican, and I was born in Chicago. It's pretty much family tradition every time we get together for Christmas and major holidays to sing. Our family time is centered around the food and a little bit of performing for one another.

Ailyn Perez

#75. It's not a question that people have a very negative image of Chicago. They just don't think about it.

Desiree Rogers

#76. called Jeff back in Chicago. "You grew up way out in the country with a bunch of brothers. Did you ever pee in cups and, like, leave them around?" Jeff was incredulous. "What? No! That's disgusting." One thousand points for Jeff.

Tina Fey

#77. For some people, home is family and their mom's house or their girl or whatever, and I have those experiences as well, but the biggest thing for me is Chicago.

Patrick Stump

#78. Surely the President can agree with us, that theft from government is not good. I know it's bold. It's out on the edge. I know from a Chicago-Springfield background it's hard to fully grasp that honesty could be part of government.

Newt Gingrich

#79. Chicago is a city of neighborhoods. We aren't trying to be all things to all people; we just want to be good neighbors. What's more Chicago than that?" "You

Stacey Ballis

#80. Celebrities in general are pretty democratic, just being in the theater. Plus, I'm from Chicago. But Obama's sensible ... he's just a reasonable, sensible human being.

James Belushi

#81. Chicago is not a bad place to live. But the usual story of immigration is the happy fulfillment of human potential in America that is not available anywhere else - it's propaganda, really. It's more complicated than that.

Aleksandar Hemon

#82. It's very freaky in Chicago.There's something in the water there, I don't know what it is. But the actual word Chicago means, in the Indian language, garlic. It was just garlic and mosquitoes there.And that is the roughest city on the planet, and I been to every place in the world.

Quincy Jones

#83. There's the big advantage of backwardness. By the time the latest ideas reach Chicago, they're worn thin and easy to see through. You don't have to bother with them and it saves lots of trouble.

Saul Bellow

#84. I shove my reading matter back into my messenger bag (it's a novel about a private magician for hire in Chicago - your taxpayer pounds at work) and go to stand in the doorway.

Charles Stross

#85. What city has given the world more in terms of American culture than New Orleans? There is none. Not New York. Not L.A. Not Chicago. Not anywhere, in the sense that African American music has gone around the world twenty times over, and it's continuing to evolve. It is our greatest cultural export.

David Simon

#86. There are many things I'm looking forward to in 2013, both personally and professionally. Plans for new restaurants in the U.S., including Eataly Chicago, are underway, and I'm gearing up for the 2013 Ironman world championships in Hawaii - if I'm lucky enough to get a spot!

Joe Bastianich

#87. When I lived in Chicago, I didn't like it. It's nice to visit.

Kyle Kinane

#88. It was Chicago with its World's Fair which vivified the national desire for civic beauty.

Daniel Burnham

#89. She loves swimming," said Ellen, who I knew had been a competitive swimmer in college.
Ellen looked in the rearview mirror at Kara.
"Don't you Kara?" asked Ellen.
There was no response.
"I didn't start until I was three," said Ellen. "She's got a two year start on me.

Daniel Amory

#90. Dancing is my number one love. That was my first goal as a child. I would love to do stage, maybe do Chicago. I love being in front of an audience. It's so stimulating. I also love to barbecue.

Carmen Electra

#91. That's what I love about Chicago ... It is the staccato aspect of the skyscrapers. But the ground is very loose, very relaxed. It makes Chicago far more pleasant than other cities.

Ben Van Berkel

#92. I think the thing about it is when you grow up in Chicago there's such a thing as putting on airs, you know? And you just learn not to put on airs. Don't act like, 'Oh boy, I'm somebody.' They'll slap you down.

Bob Newhart

#93. I like to read a couple books at once. I was reading the Princess Diana book. I'm reading a book about Chicago and the mob. Right now I'm also reading the Bible, beginning to end. I'm very religious. That's how I've gotten to where I am.

Heidi Montag

#94. The great trains howling from track to track all night. The taut and telegraphic murmur of ten thousand city wires, drawn most cruelly against a city sky. The rush of city waters, beneath the city streets. The passionate passing of the night's last El.

Nelson Algren

#95. With my early work I got eviscerated by my male professors, and so you learned to disguise your impulses, as many women have done. And that's definitely changed.

Judy Chicago

#96. It was Muddy Waters who took the Delta blues north to Chicago, electrified the sound, and changed the course of popular music as we know it. That's pretty much the judgment of history, and it is mine as well.

Tim Cahill

#97. L.A. can be pretty insane because there's so much show business here, but I also know a lot of kids who grew up in Manhattan who are some of the most normal, nicest people I know. Casting directors always say Chicago people are just nicer.

Matt Walsh

#98. One time I was standing on a corner in Chicago & a man stopped his car & asked for directions to a place I knew & I said that's too easy, ask me something harder & he yelled & said he wasn't playing games kid & then he drove off & I think about him sometimes & wonder if he ever got there.

Brian Andreas

#99. At Marshall Field in Chicago, I had them take a big bed into the menswear department, one with black sheets. I'd get in bed wearing a nightcap, and my fans would get in bed with me, one at a time, and I'd sign their memorabilia. And then I'd give them a free pint of Ben & Jerry's.

Wavy Gravy

#100. Each poet probably has his or her own cupboard of magnets. For some, it is cars; for others, works of art, or certain patterns of form or sound; for others, certain stories or places, Philip Levine's Detroit, Gwendolyn Brooks's Chicago, Seamus Heaney's time-tunneled, familied Ireland.

Jane Hirshfield