A city is where you can sign a petition, boo the chief justice, fish off a pier, gaze 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 in dark grays. San Francisco is such a city.
The trouble with born-again Christians is that they are an even bigger pain the second time around.
Cockroaches and socialites are the only things that can stay up all night and eat anything.
New Yorkers are stuck in a gloomy mucilage of mutual commiseration.
Just two days in Manhattan and you find yourself looking for a place to wash your handkerchief after you wipe your forehead and it comes away black. Is there a dirtier or more fascinating city anywhere in the land? The answer to both parts of the question has to be positively negative.
Americans are pragmatic, relatively uncomplicated, hearty and given to broad humor.
The world of Manhattan is small and tightly knit, and the man on top retains a certain humility. He knows how far and fast he can fall by looking at the guy across the street. The view from the $250,000 apartment covers a lot of ground, most of it condemned.
Philosophically, I don't like doing commercials.
San Franciscans have a bond of self-satisfaction bordering on smugness.
A city is not gauged by its length and width, but by the broadness of its vision and the height of its dreams.
A good column is one that sells paper. It doesn't matter how beautifully it is written and how much you admire the author... if it doesn't sell any papers, it's not a good column. It's a terrible yardstick to use, but in the newspaper business, that's the whole thing.
