Francisco Quotations

As a child growing up in San Francisco in the 1950s, I sometimes met insults when I ventured outside of Chinatown or my neighborhood. I have even been spat on and threatened with a knife. I could have let my anger fester until it became hate. However, I realized they were isolated incidents, and I simply got on with my life.

Forty-five years ago, when I was 18, I came to San Francisco by boat and took two weeks to get here. I had a great impression. I think San Francisco is the welcoming gate for people from Asia.

When I first played '1234' it was on stage in San Francisco at some kind of, like, sticky-floored club. And it felt like a punk song. I mean it's ridiculous to say that now, but it had that kind of, like, piercing straight melody. And then this fist-pumping ending, you know that pa-dap-pada.

In 1967, the students at San Francisco State invited the poet Amiri Baraka to the campus for a semester. He attracted other influential black writers such as Sonia Sanchez, Ed Bullins, Eldridge Cleaver. What emerged was something we called the community communications program. That's how I got involved; I got involved in a little play

Already renewable energy advocates are noting that the 42 miles of above-ground right-of-way between Yosemite and the city could be fitted with enough solar panels to generate at least 40 megawatts per year - a proposal the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission has never seriously considered because they currently aren't required to do so.

I grew up in northern California in a town called Fairfield, which is kind of exactly between San Francisco and Sacramento, a small suburb. And I'm the youngest of five children.

We opened the first Men's Wearhouse in Houston in August 1973, then a store a year for 10 years in Texas. In the early 1980s I opened a store in the San Francisco Bay Area. Within the year, the Texas economy was in total disarray. We were facing Chapter 11, and if not for the California store, we might not have survived.

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.

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.

My very first role was with James Earl Jones on 'Gabriel's Fire' on TV. He drove a Chevy Citation, which is the exact same car that I bought from a guy in San Francisco called Sandy Boone. I showed up on set, and James Earl Jones was driving the car I had bought from Sandy for $250.

I used to be a street singer in San Francisco.

What I learned with tech companies is I gotta give people room to experiment, and also to make what might later on be a mistake. This is the attitude I want to build within San Francisco - give some time to the tech community.

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.

When I went to San Francisco for the first time in 1975, I went there for a summer, this acting training program for three months in the summer - I've never been the same.

Can you name me even one time when someone else raced to the Americans in trouble? I don't think there was outside help even during the San Francisco earthquake.

Well, I started conducting kind of by accident. I wanted to give myself a special birthday present for my fortieth birthday, and I was living in San Francisco at the time and I started attending some of the concerts and then simply dropping hints.

I've always had a connection here in the city from the first day I arrived. I stayed in the city. I made San Francisco my home. I was seen in the offseason at a lot of different functions, and people liked that.

I grew up not liking coffee, even though I'm from Brazil. Then I realized when I moved to San Francisco that it's not that I don't like coffee, I just didn't like the coffee I'd had before. I fell in love with my morning cup of coffee, and my second one at 11 A.M., and so on and so forth.

The cool parts - the parts that have won Dubai its reputation as 'the Vegas of the Middle East' or 'the Venice of the Middle East' or 'the Disney World of the Middle East, if Disney World were the size of San Francisco and out in a desert' - have been built in the last ten years.

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.

Baby names are a big debate in my family. Like true Colombian and Puerto Rican families, everybody and their mother is putting their two cents in - everything from Jose to Francisco to Victorio to Rain has been suggested.

From the time I moved to San Francisco in 1967 to play with the Steve Miller Band, there was a lot of support in the music community for one cause or another, but this one was special because it was put on by people who understood where musicians hearts are.

I have no desire to go back to San Francisco.

I worked at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, lived there for three years, and lived in Baltimore for 12 years.

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

The first year I started in San Francisco, there was an American work on every program and there's been a lot of music by living composers and gradually that was part of the process of getting the audience really to trust me.

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.

San Francisco is perhaps the most European of all American cities

Within a few weeks the organization for the maintenance of international peace and security, established by the San Francisco Charter, will be formally launched through the convocation of the first General Assembly of the United Nations.

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.

I was in Tower Records in San Francisco a few weeks ago, buying some cassettes, and a couple of people recognized me and ran up with albums, and I just wanted to cover my face and have a seizure or something. I want people to just go away.

My sister and I were born in San Francisco. When our parents died, we came down here to live with relatives.

I hope I go to Heaven, and when I do, I'm going to do what every San Franciscan does when he gets there. He looks around and says, 'It ain't bad, but it ain't San Francisco.'

So, we just kind of created our own thing and that's part of the beauty of Athens: is that it's so off the map and there's no way you could ever be the East Village or an L.A. scene or a San Francisco scene, that it just became its own thing.

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

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

I like the idea that you can paint something outdoors, and anyone can see it. It's open to anyone, and people have to deal with it. In the gallery, it's the same 150 people on the San Francisco art scene. There's a dynamic on the street that's definitely more interesting.

East is East, and West is San Francisco, according to Californians. Californians are a race of people; they are not merely inhabitants of a State.

But some people will say you just did these programs. Well, yes, the programs are important and I'm proud of the programs, but mostly I'm proud of the way the San Francisco Symphony plays these programs.

Cultural tourism surveys consistently rate San Francisco's art industry as a core reason for visiting

I grew up near the sea in British Columbia and San Francisco, and lived in Malibu and Fiji for years. I get uncomfortable being too far inland.

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

After college, I went to San Francisco and worked as a secretary in a reinsurance company. That was a pretty dismal job. It was a real small place. Guys would come in, and they'd sort of stick out their arms like wings so I could take their coats off. They'd tell me, 'Two,' and I'd put two lumps of sugar in their coffee.

In the summer of 2009, in the wake of a crisis in her life, my mother moved from San Diego to San Francisco to live with my 16-year-old daughter and me. My mother was 77. I was 51. Despite a chorus of skepticism from friends - who knew about my upbringing - I was determined to do what I could to help my mother.

San Francisco has just blown us all away. I also understand Angels in America didn't do well there.

As Mayor, I will use my experience to make San Francisco a place where small businesses can thrive

My mother was actually born in Ohio but raised in West Virginia where her family had a laundry. She has a West Virginian accent. My father was born in China, but he's the son of an American citizen. My paternal grandfather was born in San Francisco in 1867.

Back in 1990, there were fewer than 20 wineries in and around Paso Robles, a farming community midway between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Most of the wines produced there were rustic, highly tannic and alcoholic, with little charm or finesse.

The single outstanding exception was the broad yet precise mandate communicated by the General Assembly in 1946 to prepare as soon as possible the Charter of Human Rights which the San Francisco Conference had not had the time or the courage to draw up.

When I work in San Francisco doing stand-up, I usually schedule it for July, and we'll drive up the coast and camp in Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo, Big Sur, and we'll just camp our way up the coast, and then we'll get to San Francisco and hang out there for four days.

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

I got out of college and I went to get my master's in creative writing at San Francisco State. I was working as an actor at the Actor's Workshop, being abused as a intern.

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

Many people in San Francisco know me, and they know my persistence.

San Francisco can no longer afford to be a city divided between downtown and neighborhoods, with a downtown that becomes a ghost town when workers go home for the evening

We recognize that the arts are an essential part of San Francisco's cultural vitality.

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.

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.

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

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.

Old San Francisco - the one so many nostalgics yearn for - had buildings that related well to each other.

I grew up in San Francisco in the 1970s. We were part of a church that belonged to the California Jesus movement.

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

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

During the 1990s, San Francisco lived through one of the most intense economic booms of its history

To me... San Francisco is an ideal city, intellectually stimulating and naturally beautiful. The oceans and forests are close enough to refresh the spirit; the architecture is always exciting.

For every family in liberal San Francisco that went solar with SunRun in 2010, nearly eight families in more conservative Fresno made the switch to our solar power service.

The misconception about Foursquare is that it's just hipsters in New York and San Francisco checking in at bars. It's happening all over the world. I've seen huge growth in Europe, Japan, South America.

As Mayor, I will lead city government, businesses, and community groups to support innovative projects that will make San Francisco streets and public places vibrant and healthy

Parallels between classical and pop are not new. The whole San Francisco movement of John Cage and Terry Riley went hand in glove with what the Velvet Underground were doing.

I did this movie with Spike Lee called 'Sucker Free City,' and that would have to be my favorite role by far. It was just so much fun to work with Spike and shoot in San Francisco.

I was part of a writers' collective with 21 writers and filmmakers called the San Francisco Writers' Grotto. We had our own office space in this old converted dog and cat hospital, and we had a basketball hoop outside. I'd bring my dog to work every day and write.

When the Chinese first came to San Francisco, they were actually welcomed by the mayor and they had special ceremonies for them-again this is when their colony was very small, only a few Chinese.

Google has already tested robot cars in San Francisco. If they can navigate San Francisco, they can probably manage just about anywhere.

San Francisco businesses face many challenges, including high rents, regulatory burdens, and the rising cost of workers compensation insurance and employee health plans

San Francisco is a mad city - inhabited for the most part by perfectly insane people whose women are of a remarkable beauty.

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

San Francisco is a city of twenty-something millionaire white kids named Doug.

We closed the restaurant in New Orleans and brought the entire staff to San Francisco. But we had to go home.

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.

Our album 'Show No Mercy' came out in late '83, and we did three or four shows in San Francisco after the release. That was our first experience with stage-divers, crowd-surfing, people walking on people across an entire crowd.

San Francisco is really fun and liberal, and it's my kind of politics. It's like being Jewish in front of Jewish people.

To my great surprise, Twitter is not housed in a silver pod that orbits Earth at supersonic speeds, vacuuming up and then dispersing digital bits of worldwide chitchat; it's in a big, bland office building in downtown San Francisco, near a bowling alley and an Old Navy.

I grew up in San Francisco. And so I'm informed in a certain kind of way about, you know, believing in democracy and believing in America. And I'm a very ardent patriot.

We tend to prefer candidates that don't talk about us one way in Scranton and another way in San Francisco.

Anyone who doesn't have a great time in San Francisco is pretty much dead to me.

I woke up full of hate and fear the day before the most recent peace march in San Francisco. This was disappointing: I'd hoped to wake up feeling somewhere between Virginia Woolf and Wavy Gravy.

It wasn't until I went to college and met different people from different areas of life - and then went to San Francisco and met people who really knew who the hell they were - that I kind of caught up in a hurry.

The best tattooists are in San Francisco, and they're kind of like my family now. I'm always excited to come back to San Francisco.

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.

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.

My aunt Marcia Cope-Hart was in 'Phantom Of the Opera' in San Francisco for quite a few years when I was growing up, so we would go into the city a lot to see her.

My turn came in the San Francisco airport. I wore the wig and put shaving cream on my face and sang like crazy.

One of the keys of playing San Francisco is containing Alan when he gets the ball in the high post. When he gets the ball in the low post, he can use his quickness to beat you. He's going to be heard from in his own career.

Of all cities, San Francisco should be able to find a way to keep these theaters.

One night we're playing San Francisco at home and Troy pulled a ball foul, it hit me right in the butt. (Giants second baseman) Ray Durham nearly fell down he was laughing so hard. I didn't go down, didn't even rub. But man it hurt. Troy got a kick out of that.

Pop culture knowledge is kind of like the new social currency for America. If you ask most people who the mayor of San Francisco is, they won't know. But if you ask them what the 'San Francisco treat' is, 99 percent of them will know it. We are a culture that loves things that are unimportant.

Ned deserves a lot of credit for what they've done in San Francisco the last 10 years, reinventing their club the way they do and always staying in the top two or three in the division. I know he's very good at negotiating contracts, has a good rapport with agents and is media-savvy.

New Orleans - along with San Francisco - is the greatest collection of 18th-, 19th- and early-20th-century residential architecture in the United States. You're talking about miles and miles of historic properties. But saving the historic context does not mean necessarily rebuilding everything in it. I don't think you build a bad 21st-century copy of a brilliant 19th-century building.

Right now I'd call this cheap. I drove through San Francisco this weekend, and it was over $3 everywhere.