Quotes About San Francisco

#1. As Mayor of San Francisco, I will work hard to ensure that, in the event of natural or man-made disasters, San Franciscans are prepared and our City is protected.

Gavin Newsom

#2. I went to the University of San Francisco on an athletic scholarship. I didn't study in high school. I was just there to get by and to play basketball. But a funny thing happened to me when I got to college. I got challenged by the work and the professors.

Michael Franti

#3. Fewer American flags [in Brooklyn] than in Florida but more than in San Francisco.

Zadie Smith

#4. Most inspiration still comes from bicycling around San Francisco. This city never fails to inspire me. It is one of the most vibrant cities - especially visually - with a constant influx of young energy arriving daily. I love it.

Barry McGee

#5. I haven't had sex in two and a half years. A guy I met in San Francisco gave me a sympathy blow job. It didn't really work. I said, "You're just doing this 'cause you feel sorry for me." We stopped in the middle.

Kevin Sessums

#6. In June 2010, I moved out of my apartment and I have been mostly homeless ever since, off and on. I just live in Airbnb apartments and I check in every week in different homes in San Francisco.

Brian Chesky

#7. The drive to Black Rock City from San Francisco leads through the Nevada flatlands, past the jittering neon sadness of Reno.

Daniel Pinchbeck

#8. Fourth quarter. The Denver Broncos played the San Francisco 49ers at

Anonymous

#9. San Francisco is a city with the assets of a metropolis without the disadvantages of size and industry.

Jack Kenny

#10. He interrupted. "No, Lisa, other families do not have sons who are Girl Scouts. I'm teaching that boy to fight," Jason muttered to himself, "A gay, black Girl Scout. What the hell happened to this family? We were normal back in San Francisco.

Jennifer Coburn

#11. I got lucky. I won the San Francisco Stand-Up Comedy Competition in 1977 while I was still at San Francisco State.

Dana Carvey

#12. San Francisco is gone. Nothing remains of it but memories.

Jack London

#13. I can live in Paris for four months or London or, you know, Barcelona. These are places that are like New York. But I don't think I could live in many places. When I had to make a film in the United States I picked San Francisco because to me it's one of the great cities of America.

Woody Allen

#14. When I sold my first book, 'A Conspiracy of Tall Men,' it was part of a two-book deal. It wasn't hugely lucrative, but it was enough money for me to quit the paralegal job I had in San Francisco.

Noah Hawley

#15. I was sitting on a plane that is traveling towards Seattle. And the guy next to me turns and says to me Hey, you going to Seattle?. Nope, San Francisco ... I'll be parachuting off in about an hour. Here's your sign!

Bill Engvall

#16. Sometimes it was hard to breathe, knowing how small my world could be. Maybe in San Francisco it wouldn't feel like the universe was conspiring to keep me in a bubble.

Heather Demetrios

#17. Dr. Paul Ekman, who worked in San Francisco - still does - which is where Pixar Animation Studios is, he had early in his career identified six. That felt like a nice, manageable number of guys to design and write for. It was anger, fear, sadness, disgust, joy and surprise.

Pete Docter

#18. You see 6,000 times more tech companies in San Francisco than you see in Seattle. All the money is in San Francisco when you look at the venture fund maps. The PR is in San Francisco. The centricity of the industry is in San Francisco.

Robert Scoble

#19. In the old days in San Francisco there was a famous drink called Pisco Punch, made from Pisco, a Peruvian brandy pisco punch used to taste like lemonade but had a kick like vodka, or worse.

Harold Ross

#20. I have long argued that we need to reopen Alcatraz to house government criminals, and let tourists on excursion boats in San Francisco Bay pay to chum the water with meat with an expired sell-by date that would otherwise have to be discarded.

L. Neil Smith

#21. I started sfCiti because I believed that technology companies needed to take a 'One City' approach and build a shared sense of community and civic responsibility in San Francisco.

Ron Conway

#22. If San Francisco is indeed a city of leaders, then I think we should lead, and if we don't want a chain store, then we should say so loudly.

Chicken John

#23. Once social change begins, it cannot be reversed. You cannot un-educate the person who has learned to read. You cannot humiliate the person who feels pride. You cannot oppress the people who are not afraid anymore.
Cesar Chavez
Address to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, Nov. 9, 1984

Cesar Chavez

#24. America has only three cities: New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans.
Everywhere else is Cleveland.

Tennessee Williams

#25. I went to grad school in San Francisco, and then left for New York City with my eye on Broadway. I had saved $5000, which seemed like a lot of money in my mind ... until I realized it was going to take $2500 to get to New York and then the first and last month's rent.

Anika Noni Rose

#26. Not very many companies go through Hawaii on their way to anywhere. San Francisco Ballet was the only company I remember, and Bolshoi, coming through Hawaii when I was younger.

Joan Chen

#27. I am a big 'Ellen' fan. I have been one for quite a long time now. I used to do the local news talk shows with her in San Francisco, when we were both still kids.

Margaret Cho

#28. Just before my final year of high school, my brother, sister and I moved with my mother to San Francisco.

Eric Allin Cornell

#29. San Francisco has always been my favorite booing city. I don't mean the people boo louder or longer, but there is a very special intimacy. When they boo you, you know they mean you. Music, that's what it is to me. One time in Kezar Stadium they gave me a standing boo.

George Halas

#30. When we were working on 'Looking' in San Francisco, I bought a new bike from Mission Bicycle Company, which I'm completely in love with.

Murray Bartlett

#31. San Francisco lags behind other communities in providing a vital, vibrant and ecologically sustainable urban canopy, as well as open space in the city.

Gavin Newsom

#32. From the beginning, there was so much pressure in the early San Francisco punk scene for everyone to be different than everyone else, to flaunt your intelligence and insights instead of every band sounding alike, like what plagues punk music in particular today.

Jello Biafra

#33. I went to school at the San Francisco Art Institute, thinking I was going to become an art teacher. Within the first six months I was there, I was told that I couldn't be an art teacher unless I became an artist first.

Annie Leibovitz

#34. One of our very favorite shows of 2008 was our Slowtrain instore. We drove straight from San Francisco, pulled up to the back of the store, dragged our entire setup inside and played our new album, Rook, start-to-finish - and they let us get away with it.

Jonathan Meiburg

#35. The distance between Mooreland in 1965 and a city like San Francisco in 1965 is roughly equivalent to the distance starlight must travel before we look up casually from a cornfield and see it.

Haven Kimmel

#36. There's two different disks recorded at two different shows. And they're two very different shows. The San Francisco disk was in front of 450 people and was a real professional show where people did their best stuff. So to some people that's going to be their favorite disk.

B. J. Porter

#37. The good citizen when he opens his door in the evening must be banker, golfer, husband, father; not a nomad wandering the desert, a mystic staring at the sky, a debauchee in the slums of San Francisco, a soldier heading a revolution, a pariah howling with skepticism and solitude.

Virginia Woolf

#38. The San Francisco skyline sparkles in the distance, the bay spread out before it like a shark-infested welcome mat.

T.T. Monday

#39. It still astounds me, after forty years, that there is no good bread between Chicago and San Francisco.

Jane Smiley

#40. One hot summer night in San Francisco, roughly 10 years ago, I was sitting in a crowded Pacific Heights restaurant when Alice Adams walked in with a man. She was about 60 at the time, and she was wearing a skirt that fell an inch or so above her knees and flat heels without stockings.

Mary Gaitskill

#41. 12-27-10
Palace Hotel, San Francisco- Over Christmas
In bed, lights out:
O: 'Oh, oh, oh...!'
I: 'What was that for?'
O: 'I found your fifth rib.'
In the middle of the night: 'Wouldn't it be nice if we could dream together?' O whispers.

Bill Hayes

#42. I think maybe L.A. or San Francisco could be rushed, but Sacramento is just laid back!

Nick Johnson

#43. I didn't really start writing music or lyrics or turning them into songs until I went to San Francisco.

Jello Biafra

#44. When you play quarterback in San Francisco, not much goes under the radar.

Steve Young

#45. I was at a benefit for some imprisoned students in the '60s at San Francisco State, and there were lots of poets reading for the benefit: one was Elizabeth Bishop.

Thom Gunn

#46. San Francisco would be a good location for a murder mystery.

Alfred Hitchcock

#47. Mom said we should all live near the Pacific Ocean at least once in our lives, so we kept going all the way to San Francisco.

Jeannette Walls

#48. You grow up real quick, a half-Mexican in a sailor's suit, because I'd be riding the streetcar to school everyday - minding my own business, humming out a 'Frere Jacques' - and I realized that in any other town, this might be considered cute. But you know what it is in San Francisco? Sexy.

Al Madrigal

#49. I move between San Francisco and Paris ... I have a wonderful beach house in California.

Danielle Steel

#50. In my twenties in San Francisco I became a sophisticate and an acting agnostic. It wasn't that I had stopped believing in God; it's just that God didn't seem to be around the neighborhoods I frequented.

Maya Angelou

#51. Maybe I'll go where I can see stars, he said to himself as the car gained velocity and altitude; it headed away from San Francisco, toward the uninhabited desolation to the north. To the place where no living thing would go. Not unless it felt that the end had come.

Philip K. Dick

#52. In Marin County, north of San Francisco, the search for a safe haven resulted in a new apartment complex - the first, and only, such government-sponsored project aimed at MCS.

Peter Radetsky

#53. Asking who won a given war, someone has said, is like asking who won the San Francisco earthquake. That in war there is no victory but only varying degrees of defeat is a proposition that has gained increasing acceptance in the twentieth century.

Kenneth Waltz

#54. Any city may have one period of magnificence, like Boston or New Orleans or San Francisco, but it takes a real one to keep renewing itself until the past is perennially forgotten.

A.J. Liebling

#55. Back in the 60s, San Francisco artists lived in communes.

Gedde Watanabe

#56. If anybody asks me what I attribute the longevity of my career to, then I say it's because I was never satisfied with being a cowboy in the plains of Spain and later I was never satisfied with just playing a detective in San Francisco, and constantly just pushing the envelope.

Clint Eastwood

#57. Left the ranch in 1883, went to California, going through the States and territories, reached Ogden the latter part of 1883, and San Francisco in 1884.

Calamity Jane

#58. The line, Lasko. Do you know anyone in San Francisco? Are you just gonna get off the train and take a streetcar to the swimming pool?" "I might. I could." "You have to have a plan, Lasko." "No, I don't. Not after this. I don't have to have a plan in the world.

Armistead Maupin

#59. San Francisco! City of dreaming spires, people live here ... Golden Gate Bridge, ahh the Romans came here.

Eddie Izzard

#60. Louis Kelso of San Francisco, a lawyer-economist, has for years felt that he has a radical answer to the problem.

William F. Buckley Jr.

#61. As a young surgeon in training at the University of California San Francisco General Hospital in the early '80s, my colleagues and I were inundated with an epidemic of young men with fevers, rashes, swollen lymph nodes and eventually death.

Richard Carmona

#62. There is more grace per square foot in San Francisco than any place on earth.

Fulton J. Sheen

#63. San Francisco itself is art, above all literary art. Every block is a short story, every hill a novel. Every home a poem, every dweller within immortal. That is the whole truth.

William, Saroyan

#64. I'd always wanted to live in San Francisco, and my circumstances never permitted it. I'm so happy I made the move.

Mitch Kapor

#65. I'm a huge fan of the Bay Area so I always love coming to San Francisco.

Ezra Koenig

#66. I was born in San Francisco's Chinatown in 1948 but grew up in a black neighborhood. During elementary and middle school, I commuted to a bilingual school in Chinatown. So I did not confront white American culture until high school.

Laurence Yep

#67. To me, doing a gay pride show is one of the most fun things. My first show that paid more than $10,000 was in a gay club on New Year's Eve in San Francisco.

Queen Latifah

#68. I grew up in Marin County north of San Francisco, and in the 1950s and '60s it was a natural paradise.

Huey Lewis

#69. I think San Francisco is the best place in the whole world for an easy life.

Imogen Cunningham

#70. But I would rather be with you, somewhere in San Francisco on a back porch in July, just looking up to Heaven, at this crescent in the sky

Robert Hunter

#71. I live near San Francisco in the most beautiful spot on earth and enjoy myself in many ways. Yes, I love to work, which for now is to think and read and write, so it's all a dream come true.

Francis Ford Coppola

#72. When I got to San Francisco that afternoon, it was one of those days that arrives at the end of summer just as the last tourists are leaving complaining about the cold and fog.

Michael Nava

#73. They almost had to cancel the Oscars tonight because all of the designers and stylists are still in line in San Francisco trying to marry one another.

Joan Rivers

#74. San Francisco has long been a leader in the arts, nurturing generations of painters, sculptors, poets, novelists, playwrights, film-makers, and performing artists and innovators of every kind.

Gavin Newsom

#75. On the personal side, family is really important to me. I have a big family - five kids and 12 grandkids - so keeping that going is wonderful. And I do a lot of philanthropy. I'm chairman of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Charles Schwab

#76. My family moved a lot as a kid. We started in Colorado, where I lived for five years. We moved to Chicago for two years, to San Francisco for one year, Connecticut for seven, Oregon for a couple years, and then I went to school.

Gus Van Sant

#77. The 1890s was a decade when life began to change in urban America. Modern conveniences that we now take for granted came into use; women's roles became less restrictive; and San Francisco, a port city with influences from all over the world, was a lively place in which to reside.

Marcia Muller

#78. I moved to San Francisco when I was 20 years old. I couldn't even drink yet. My friends in college thought I was so stupid for missing out on the four best years of my life. But I was so ready to start living my own life and absorb Silicon Valley culture.

Brit Morin

#79. When I went to get my master's in creative writing at San Francisco State after Grinnell, I joined the moribund remnants of the Actor's Workshop, until I saw Kay Hayward and Sandy Archer in the San Francisco Mime Troupe and drove down that day to audition. The rest is history.

Peter Coyote

#80. If you rent a U-Haul to move your company, it costs twice as much to go from San Francisco to Austin than the other way around, because you can't find enough trucks to leave the Golden State.

Rick Perry

#81. San Francisco's winter is a season unto itself. Fleeting, rain-soaked, verdant, a brief period of shadows and renewal

Nathaniel Dorsky

#82. Born at Letterman Army Hospital. I never actually lived in San Francisco. It's not my home town, but then, I don't have one. I'm a nomad ... a gypsy ... an Army Brat. Put me on an airplane, send me anywhere. That's where I belong ... anywhere.

Marc Curtis

#83. 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

#84. The world has experienced a revival of an old faith in the everlasting moral force of justice. At no time in history has there been a more important Conference, or a more necessary meeting, than this one in San Francisco, which you are opening today.

Harry S. Truman

#85. I have always been rather better treated in San Francisco than I actually deserved.

Mark Twain

#86. The funeral was held at St. Mary's Catherdral of San Francisco, which has the distinction of being the only church in the world designed after a washing-machine agitator.

Christopher Moore

#87. Nothing important has ever come out of San Francisco, Rice-a-Roni aside.

Michael O'Donoghue

#88. I looked westward and marveled that, somewhere over those mountains, Kabul still existed. It really existed, not just as an old memory, or as the heading of an AP story on page 15 of the San Francisco Chronicle.

Khaled Hosseini

#89. Jared told her he used to be an exotic dancer in San Francisco.'
'My body is a gift from God,' Jared said gravely. 'Except for my hips, which are clearly a gift from the devil.

Sarah Rees Brennan

#90. 'I think you ought to go to New York or Chicago or San Francisco or any city with character and vitality. You should go to work. This place is no good for you, Randy. The air is like soup and the people are like noodles. You're vegetating. I don't want a vegetable. I want a man.' - Lib McGovern

Pat Frank

#91. How is San Francisco, Alex? Lovely city. Will you leave your heart there? Do you think it's a good place to die?

James Patterson

#92. I messed around in high school, but I pretty much put it away until I did a television show in San Francisco.

Gary Cole

#93. 130 of Automattic's 150 employees work outside of our San Francisco headquarters. Why are so many companies stuck in this factory model of working?

Matt Mullenweg

#94. When I was a kid, I loved watching kung fu movies - in San Francisco, we had 'Kung Fu Theater' on TV on Saturdays, and they'd air old Shaw Brothers movies with English dubbing, things like that.

Daniel Wu

#95. It's an odd thing, but anyone who disappears
is said to be seen in San Francisco.
It must be a delightful city and possess
all the attractions of the next world

Oscar Wilde

#96. After I arrived in Mountain View, California, in the San Francisco Bay Area, I entered sixth grade and quickly grew to love my new home, family and culture. I discovered a passion for language, though it was hard to learn the difference between formal English and American slang.

Jose Antonio Vargas

#97. When I was 13, I began relaxing my hair, and that meant when I turned 18 it began to crack and fall off, and when I began anchoring, I had short, stubbly pieces of hair. And trying to report in San Francisco with fog meant my hair swelled.

Soledad O'Brien

#98. I'm proud to have been a Yankee. But I have found more happiness and contentment since I came back home to San Francisco than any man has a right to deserve. This is the friendliest city in the world.

Joe DiMaggio

#99. We are very proud of our design for the Transbay Transit Center. This will be a beautiful, functional and sustainable building for San Francisco.

Cesar Pelli

#100. San Francisco is a world to explore. It is a place where the heart can go on a delightful adventure.

William, Saroyan