My 100 Favourite San Francisco Quotes

If the number of views is the true gauge of success, then the most popular of the two hundred posts I have submitted on this blog has been “My 50 San Francisco Quotes”. I’m sure that it is pure coincidence that it happens to be the one that contains fewest of my own words.

Moving swiftly on, and building on that success, I have now expanded it to 100. And with no more ado:

1. One day if I go to heaven…..I’ll look around and say “It ain’t bad, but it ain’t San Francisco”. (Herb Caen)
2. San Francisco has only one drawback – ’tis hard to leave. (Rudyard Kipling)
3. You know what it is? (It) is a golden handcuff with the key thrown away. (John Steinbeck)
4. East is East, and West is San Francisco. (O. Henry)
5. San Franciscans are very proud of their city, and they should be.  It’s the most beautiful place in the world.  (Robert Redford)
6. If you’re alive, you can’t be bored in San Francisco.  If you’re not alive, San Francisco will bring you to life……San Francisco is a world to explore. It is a place where the heart can go on a delightful adventure. It is a city in which the spirit can know refreshment every day.  (William Saroyan)
7. Every man should be allowed to love two cities, his own and San Francisco.  (Gene Fowler)
8. Of all cities in the United States I have seen, San Francisco is the most beautiful.  (Nikita Kruschev)
9. I prefer a wet San Francisco to a dry Manhattan. (Larry Geraldi)
10. The cool, grey city of love. (George Sterling)
11. I never dreamed I’d like any city as well as London.  San Francisco is exciting, moody, exhilarating.  I even love the muted fogs.  (Julie Christie)
12. I don’t know of any other city where you can walk through so many culturally diverse neighbourhoods, and you’re never out of sight of the wild hills.  Nature is very close here.  (Gary Snyder)
13. 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 rigo deserve. This is the friendliest city in the world. (Joe di Maggio)
14. San Francisco is 49 square miles surrounded by reality.  (Paul Kantner)
15. The ultimate (travel destination) for me would be one perfect day in San Francisco.  It’s a perfect 72 degrees, clear, the sky bright blue.  I’d start down at Fisherman’s Wharf with someone I really like and end with a romantic dinner and a ride over the Golden Gate Bridge.  There’s no city like it anywhere.  And, if I could be there with the girl of my dreams, that would be the ultimate.  (Larry King)
16. The port of San Francisco……is a marvel of nature, and might well be called the harbor of harbors….And I think if it could be well settled like Europe there would not be anything more beautiful in all the world” (Juan Bautista de Anza)
17. Leaving San Francisco is like saying goodbye to an old sweetheart.  You want to linger as long as possible.  (Walter Kronkite)
18. The Bay Area is so beautiful, I hesitate to preach about heaven while I’m here. (Billy Graham)
19. San Francisco can start right now to become number one. We can set examples so that others will follow. We can start overnight. We don’t have to wait for budgets to be passed, surveys to be made, political wheelings and dealings…….for it takes no money……it takes no compromising to give the people their rights……it takes no money to respect the individual. It takes no political deal to give people freedom. It takes no survey to remove repression. (Harvey Milk)
20. There’s no question this is where I want to live.  Never has been.  (Robin Williams)
21. San Francisco is one of my favourite cities in the world…I would probably rank it at the top or near the top.  It’s small but photogenic and has layers…You never have problems finding great angles that people have never done.  (Ang Lee)
22. When you get tired of walking around in San Francisco, you can always lean against it.  (unknown)
23. It seemed like a matter of minutes when we began rolling in the foothills before Oakland and suddenly reached a height and saw stretched out of us the fabulous white city of San Francisco on her eleven mystic hills with the blue Pacific and its advancing wall of potato-patch fog beyond, and smoke and goldenness in the late afternoon of time. (Jack Kerouac)
24. There may not be a Heaven, but there is San Francisco. (Ashleigh Brilliant)
25. I have done more for San Francisco than any of its old residents. Since I left there it has increased in population fully 300,000. I could have done more – I could have gone earlier – it was suggested. (Mark Twain)
26. I find no objection to turning Hollywood into a suburb of San Francisco, the most photogenic city in the world. (Mayor Joseph Alioto)
27. The City that knows how. (William Howard Taft)
28. San Francisco is the only city I can think of that can survive all the things you people are doing to it and still look beautiful. (Frank Lloyd Wright)
29. You wouldn’t think such a place as San Francisco could exist.  The wonderful sunlight here, the hills, the great bridges, the Pacific at your shoes.  Beautiful Chinatown.  Every race in the world.  The sardine fleets sailing out.  The little cable-cars whizzing down The City hills….And all the people are open and friendly.  (Dylan Thomas)
30. (San Francisco) is a rich, lusty city, rippling with people, with movement, with girls in summer dresses, with flowers, with color; one of the great and wonderful cities of the world….the great seaport of the Pacific now, one of the great naval bases. Through it have poured a million men…..And the sea is always just on the other side of those hills. (James Marlow)
31. I certainly was surprised to be named Poet Laureate of this far-out city on the left side of the world, and I gratefully accept, for as I told the Mayor, “How could I refuse?” I’d rather be Poet Laureate of San Francisco than anywhere because this city has always been a poetic center, a frontier for free poetic life, with perhaps more poets and more poetry readers than any city in the world. (Lawrence Ferlinghetti)
32. In all my travels I have never seen the hospitality of San Francisco equalled anywhere in the world.  (Conrad Hilton)
33. San Francisco! Is there a land where the magic of that name has not been felt? (Clarence F. Edwards)
34. Your city is remarkable not only for its beauty.  It is also, of all the cities in the United States, the one whose name, the world over, conjures up the most visions and more than any other city incites one to dream.  (Georges Pompidou)
35. It’s a mad city, inhabited by insane people whose women are of remarkable beauty (Rudyard Kipling)
36. Somehow the great cities of America have taken their places in a jythology that shapes their destiny: money live sin New York. Power sits in Washington. Freedom sips cappuccino in a sidewalk café in San Francisco. (Joe Flower)
37. I was married once – in San Francisco. I haven’t seen her for many years. The great earthquake and fire in 1906 destroyed the marriage certificate. There’s no legal proof. Which means that earthquakes aren’t always bad. (W.C. Fields)
38. It is a good thing the early settlers landed on the East Coast; if they’d landed in San Francisco first, the rest of the country would still be uninhabited.  (Herbert Mye)
39. What fetched me instantly (and thousands of other newcomers with me) was the subtle but unmistakeable sense of escape from the United States.  (H.L. Mencken)
40. The City of San Francisco (the metropolis of the State) considering its age, is by long odds the most wonderful city on the face of the earth.  (G.W. Sullivan)
41. Any one who doesn’t have a great time in San Francisco is pretty much dead to me. (Anthony Boudain)
42. There are just three big cities in the United States that are “story cities” – New York, of course, New Orleans, and, best of the lot, San Francisco. (Frank Norris)
43. You have in San Francisco this magnificent Civic Center crowned by a City Hall which I have never seen anywhere equalled.  (Joseph Strauss)
44. A city is where you can sign a petition, boo the chief justice, fish off a pier, gape at a hippopotamus, buy a flower at the corner, or get a good hamburger or a bad girl at 4 A.M. A city is where sirens make white streaks of sound in the sky and foghorns speak dark grays – San Francisco is such a city. (Herb Caen)
45. Caen’s San Francisco may not be the city we remember, but it is the city we want to remember. (Mayor Willie Brown)
46. Of all American cities of whatever size the most friendly on preliminary inspection, and on further acquaintance the most likable. The happiest-hearted, the gayest, the most care-free city on this continent.  (Irwin S. Cobb)
47. No city invites the heart to come to life as San Francisco does.  Arrival in San Francisco is an experience in living.  (William Saroyan)
48. God took the beauty of the Bay of Naples, the Valley of the Nile, the Swiss Alps, the Hudson River Valley, rolled them into one and made San Francisco Bay.  (Fiorello La Guardia)
49. I always see about six scuffles a night when I come to San Francisco.  That’s one of the town’s charms.  (Erroll Flynn)
50. San Francisco is a complex town that lets you be yourself, that accepts you even if your family doesn’t. No matter how uncomfortable your own skin feels, you can move to this city, discover who you really are, and plant your feet on the ground.  (Jack Boulware)
51. San Francisco, open your Golden Gate, you’ll let nobody wait outside your door, San Francisco, here is your wanderin’ one, saying I’ll wander no more. (Gus Khan, Bronislaw Kaper, Walter Jurrman)
52. San Francisco! – one of my two favorite cities.  There is more grace per square foot in San Francisco than any place on earth!  (Bishop Fulton J. Sheen)
53. I don’t think San Francisco needs defending.  I never meet anyone who doesn’t love the place, Americans or others.  (Doris Lessing)
54. There are a thousand viewpoints in the viewtiful city. (Herb Caen)
55. San Francisco has always been a haven for misfits and weirdos. I’m both of these, which is why I came here. (Michael Franti)
56. I think San Francisco is the best place in the whole world for an easy life. (Imogen Cunningham)
57. San Francisco is perhaps the most European of all American cities. (Cecil Beaton)
58. San Francisco is Beautiful People wearing a bracelet of bridges.  (Hal Lipset)
59. I have always been rather better treated in San Francisco than I actually deserved (Mark Twain)
60. 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 attraction of the next world. (Oscar Wilde).
61. Every city on earth has its special sink of vice, crime and degradation, its running ulcer or moral cancer, which it would fain hide from the gaze of mankind…..San Franciscans will not yield the palm of superiority to anything to be found elsewhere in the world. Speak of the deeper depth, the lower hell, the maelstrom of vice and iniquity – from whence those who once fairly enter escape no more forever – and they will point triumphantly to the Barbary Coast, strewn from end to end with the wrecks of humanity, and challenge you to match it anywhere outside of he lake of fire and brimstone. (Colonel Evans)
62. If you’re going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair, if you’re going to San Francisco, you’re gonna meet some gentle people there. (John Phillips)
63. San Francisco is the greatest…the hills…fabulous food…most beautiful and civilised people.  (Duke and Duchess of Bedford)
64. The old San Francisco is dead. The gayest, lightest hearted, and most pleasure-loving city of the western continent, and in many ways the most interesting and romantic, is a horde of refugees living among ruins. It may rebuild; it probably will; but those who have known that peculiar city by the Golden Gate, have caught its flavour of the Arabian Nights, feel it can never be the same. It is as though a pretty, frivolous woman has passed through a great tragedy. She survives, but she is sobered and different. If it rises out of the ashes it must be a modern city, much like other cities without its old atmosphere. (Will Irwin)
65. I love San Francisco.  It would be a perfect place for a honeymoon.  (Kim Novak)
66. San Francisco is a breathtakingly beautiful city, with lots of great contrasts between dark and light, often overlapping each other. It’s a great setting for a horror story. (Christopher Moore)
67. Now there’s a grown-up swinging town.  (Frank Sinatra)
68. Whoever after due and proper warning shall be heard to utter the abominable word “Frisco”, which has no linguistic or other warrant, shall be deemed guilty of High Misdemeanour, and shall pay into the Imperial Treasury as penalty the sum of twenty-five dollars. (Emperor Norton)
69. If civil disobedience is the way to go about change, than I think a lot of people will be going to San Francisco (Rosie O’Donnell)
70. I don’t like San Francisco.  I love it!  (Dorothy Lamour)
71. “Queen of the Pacific Coast! Fair city whose changing skies for half the year shower down mist and rain, and the other half sunbeams of molten brass! Metropolis of alternate sticky mud and blinding dust! In spite of these and more thou art a city of my heart,  O Ciudad de San Francisco!” (T.S. Kenderdine)
72. Two days in this city is worth two months in New York.  (Robert Menzies)
73. I’m just mad for San Francisco.  It is like London and Paris stacked on top of each other.  (Twiggy)
74. I fell in love with the most cordial and sociable city in the Union. After the sagebrush and alkali deserts of Wahoe, San Francisco was Paradise to me. (Mark Twain)
75. San Francisco is poetry.  Even the hills rhyme.  (Pat Montandon)
76. San Francisco itself is art, above all literary art. Every block is a short story, every hill a novel. Every house a poem, every dweller within immortal. This is the whole truth. (William Saroyan)
77. I love this city.  If I am elected, I’ll move the White House to San Francisco. Everybody’s so friendly.  (Robert Kennedy)
78. I like the fog that creeps over the whole city every night about five, and the warm protective feeling it gives…and lights of San Francisco at night, the fog horn, the bay at dusk and the little flower stands where spring flowers appear before anywhere else in the country…But, most of all, I like the view of the ocean from the Cliff House.  (Irene Dunne)
79. San Francisco is really fun and liberal, and it’s my kind of politics. It’s like being Jewish in front of Jewish people. (Elayne Bossier)
80. I love San Francisco and Brighton has something of San Francisco about it. It’s by the sea, there’s a big gay community, a feeling of people being there because they enjoy their life there. (Brian Eno)
81. We’re crazy about this city.  First time we came here, we walked the streets all day – all over town – and nobody hassled us.  People smiled, friendly-like, and we knew we could live here……Los Angeles? That’s just a big parking lot where you buy a hamburger for a trip to San Francisco……And the beautiful old houses and the strange light.  We’ve never been in a city with light like this.  We sit in our hotel room for hours, watching the fog come in, the light change.  (John Lennon and Yoko Ono)
82. The extreme geniality of San Francisco’s economic, intellectual and political climate makes it the most varied and challenging city in the United States (James Michener)
83. 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)
84. I have seen few things as beautiful as a 6.30 am lift-off from San Francisco International Airport in the autumn. From above, the rippled fog layer laps against the shores of the foothills like a voluminous cotton ocean (Eric Chang)
85. San Francisco is a city with the assets of a metropolis without the disadvantages of size and industry.  (Jack Kenny)
86. Isn’t it nice that people who prefer Los Angeles to San Francisco live there? (Herb Caen)
87. San Francisco is one of the great cultural plateaus in the world….one of the really urbane communities in the United States…one of the truly cosmopolitan places – and for many, many years, it has always had a warm welcome for human beings from all over the world.  (Duke Ellington)
88. The Golden Gate Bridge’s daily strip tease from enveloping stoles of mist to full frontal glory is still the most provocative show in town (Mary Moore Mason)
89. No visit to the United States would be complete without San Francisco – this beautiful city, center of the West, very well known for its beauty and the place where the United Nations was born.  (Queen Sirikit of Thailand)
90. To a traveler paying his first visit, it has the interest of a new planet.  It ignores the meteorological laws which govern the rest of the world.  (Fitz Hugh Ludlow)
91. Cities are like gentlemen, they are born, not made.  You are either a city, or you are not, size has nothing to do with it.  I bet San Francisco was a city from the very first time it had a dozen settlers.  New York is “Yokel”, but San Francisco is “City at Heart”.  (Will Rogers)
92. God! I loove this city! (Herb Caen)
93. This is the first place in the United States where I sang, and I like San Francisco better than any other city in the world.  I love no city more than this one.  Where else could I sing outdoors on Christmas Eve?  (Luisa Tetrazzini)
94. The San Francisco Bay Area is the playpen of countercultures (RZ Sheppard)
95. I have seen purer liqors, better segars, finer tobacco, truer guns and pistols, larger dirks and bowie knives, and prettier women courtesans here in San Francisco than in any other place I have ever visited. (Hinton Helper)
96. San Francisco is gone. Nothing remains of it but memories. (Jack London)
97. San Francisco may soon become the first fully gentrified city in America, the urban equivalent of a gated bedroom community…..Now it’s becoming almost impossible for a lot of the people who have made this such a world-class city – people who have been the heart and soul of the city for decades – from the fishers and pasta makers and blue-collar workers to the jazz musicians to the beat poets to the hippies to the punks and so many others –to exist here anymore. And when you’ve lost that part of the city, you’ve lost San Francisco. (Daniel Zoll)
98. San Francisco is a city where people are never more abroad than when they are at home.  (Benjamin F. Taylor)
99. It’s the grandest city I saw in America.  If everyone acted as the San Franciscans did, there would be hope for settlement of the world’s difficulties.  (Frol Zozlov)
100. To this day the city of San Francisco remains to the Chinese the Great City of the Golden Mountains.  (Kai Fu Shah)

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Roast Chicken Rescue in Hayes Valley

One of the pleasures of renting an apartment in San Francisco is that, should friends or family be in the vicinity, they can call in – just like at home. However, on the first occasion that we “entertained” another couple from the UK, things did not quite go as smoothly as planned.

We were renting an apartment in the increasingly hip neighbourhood of Hayes Valley. Our friends had been based at a hotel on the Wharf for four nights before moving on to Las Vegas for the remainder of their two week vacation. We had hired a car for the week to enable us to chauffeur them around many of the unashamedly tourist sights they had not been able to enjoy on their only previous visit, on shore leave from a cruise ship.

We had already crammed in brunch at the Cliff House, driving over the Golden Gate Bridge to the Marin Headlands and Sausalito, taking Highway 1 to Monterey and Carmel, Golden Gate Park and a typically uproarious performance of Beach Blanket Babylon. We had also eaten at the Crab House at Pier 39 and the Stinking Rose – I did say it was touristy didn’t I?

On Sunday, their final full day, we had arranged that they would come to the apartment in the evening for a traditional English roast dinner.

We had prepared this meal dozens of times at home without any mishaps. However, there was a new dimension which had potential to derail the event.

We were cooking it in an American oven.

Many readers will now be thinking – “so what was the problem”?

The problem was that we didn’t have a great track record when navigating our way around an American oven. Despite half a dozen holidays spent at my cousin’s house near Orlando, we had never quite been able to master it. I would not recommend a pizza “cooked” in the microwave – that’s about the level of expertise we had acquired over the years.

It all boils down – no pun intended – to the difference between broiling and baking food, the timing mechanism and our inability to read the cooking instructions on the packaging properly. It seems (fairly) simple now (broiling cooks from the top and baking from the bottom), but we got ourselves into terrible difficulties in the past with this. It would have been sensible, of course, to have researched it beforehand or just asked somebody.

But we didn’t.

The upshot was that this particular chicken resisted our attempts to cook it at the required speed and consistency. The prospects for crisp roast potatoes later on were looking equally bleak.

Meanwhile, back at the Sheraton Hotel in Fisherman’s Wharf, our friends were anticipating a culinary treat a few miles to the south west. Little did they know that they were likely to be feasting on a plate of boiled carrots, broccoli and potatoes – or a pizza (delivered, not microwaved).

But we set aside our embarrassment and sought help from our landlord, who had the good sense to live in the apartment above with his partner and two adorable labradoodles, Taylor and Cooper (named after two all-American movie stars). Taking the back steps, with a passing nod (and perhaps prayer) to the Buddha sat among the bushes, I found the whole family in the kitchen preparing their own dinner.

Awkward?

Not at all. They were only too happy to explain the workings of the oven to us.

And the dogs saw it as a great opportunity to hoover up any scraps from previous meals.

There followed ten minutes of frantic switch turning, knob pressing, opening and shutting of doors and perusal of instructions, accompanied by a series of exasperated but elegant expletives, before they concluded that:

a) they had no more idea of how the oven worked than we did; but

b) it was, in fact, broken.

Huge relief on our part in one sense, but………

Our friends’ taxi would be calling at the hotel reception shortly and the odds on them eating this meal before being served lunch on the plane were shortening by the minute.

Our landlord promised to call their handyman immediately, and it was duly fixed whilst we were out the next day, but tonight’s plans were looking shattered.

Until…………

In a gesture of generosity beyond his landlord responsibilities, especially with his own evening meal in an advanced state of preparedness, he offered to cook the chicken and potatoes for us in his own oven. He was anxious too to prepare it exactly as we would have done it. This included parboiling the potatoes which we managed triumphantly on the hob of our own cooker – before handing them over for roasting along with the chicken.

There would be an inevitable delay in dishing up, but the Beringer White Zinfandel softened the blow whilst we waited.

Eventually, about an hour later than originally planned, the back door swung open to reveal our heroes, wearing aprons that left little to the imagination, striding across the floor as if waiting on a banquet with, respectively, a gloriously cooked chicken on a silver platter, surrounded by a generous mound of crisp, steaming roast potatoes.

They had been cooked to perfection, which is more than could be said for the carrots and broccoli that we had vainly striven not to overcook whilst awaiting the main event.

Sensibly, Taylor and Cooper had been confined to quarters for this ceremony.

The evening passed off well, nobody was poisoned, and despite the inconvenience to which we had put our landlord, we still got our deposit back!

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