Top 300 San Francisco Quotes

Words matter. These are the best San Francisco Quotes from famous people such as Paul Prudhomme, Cindy Sheehan, Ron Conway, Shannon Sharpe, London Breed, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.

We closed the restaurant in New Orleans and brought the

We closed the restaurant in New Orleans and brought the entire staff to San Francisco. But we had to go home.
Paul Prudhomme
Many people in San Francisco know me, and they know my persistence.
Cindy Sheehan
Cities like New York have already followed San Francisco and have started similar organizations like sfCiti; New York has TECH NYC.
Ron Conway
Colin Kaepernick had a… maybe he had an epiphany. Maybe he had a realization that ‘I have a higher calling the playing quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers.’
Shannon Sharpe
San Francisco needs a Mayor who will make all our neighborhoods safe, a Mayor with a record of standing up for public safety and fighting for the resources we need.
London Breed
Playing football in San Francisco was almost a transcendental experience.
Steve Young
I’ve been around all kinds of people, defense attorneys, working with cops, working with politicians, both sides of the aisle, including Democrats as former first lady of San Francisco, and the Republicans, too, so I’ve had a front row seat to lots of things in life.
Kimberly Guilfoyle
Back in the 60s, San Francisco artists lived in communes.
Gedde Watanabe
I announced at the dinner table when I was 11 that I wanted to be a ballet dancer. But my goal changed to musical theater after the choreographer Robert Joffrey saw me perform while I was on scholarship at the San Francisco Ballet School.
Ann Reinking
I grew up in San Francisco and moved to L.A. about 20 years ago, and now my main home is in Hollywood.
Roman Coppola
I had talked for years about doing a restaurant with Rocky Dudum, who’s been my friend since I first came to San Francisco. Then Rocky’s son, Jeff, said he wanted to design it, so he traveled around the country to sports restaurants like Mickey Mantle’s and Michael Jordan’s, and he came up with a great concept.
Willie McCovey
In 2007, I was living in San Francisco. I came out of business school, and I was very keen on doing something with a small company. I felt that the market, in general, in mobile phones was just going to explode.
Naveen Tewari
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
I don’t know about the time those songs were written. But he was jamming with someone in Colorado or San Francisco, and I’m sure he was working on the lyrics right up to the show because they were really relevant for the situation.
Krist Novoselic
I’ve little in common with the scene in Silicon Valley and San Francisco. I’m a New Yorker.
Jon Oringer
Our work is not done until everyone is safe and celebrated not just in San Francisco, but also across the country.
London Breed
I got to see The Beatles a couple of times. In fact, I saw their last performance ever in San Francisco. The Beatles were massive to me – I learned so much from them.
Timothy B. Schmit
I’ve always liked and appreciated storytellers like Garry Shandling and Bill Cosby – more long-form comedy. So starting in San Francisco, watching all these great comics – Patton Oswalt, Dave Chappelle – you get to see them a bunch, and you go, ‘Wow, this is where I need to be.’
Al Madrigal
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.
Bobby McFerrin
I went to Indiana University for college for a couple of years, where I double majored in dance and journalism, and after my sophomore year there, I went to the San Francisco Ballet school for the summer, but then they offered me a scholarship to stay for the year.
Amanda Schull
When it came time to go to college, I had been accepted for Harvard when my father was offered the position of head of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company office on the west coast, and we moved to San Francisco.
Douglass North
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.
Cordell Hull
We don’t suggest that because San Francisco lies on top of an earthquake fault that it should be moved.
John Breaux
If you turn on ABC 7 in the morning San Francisco, you’ll see them using an iPad with Waze on it, and actually talking about.
Noam Bardin
San Francisco is an interesting place. It’s always been such a nice culturally diverse environment, which it still is, but there’s a lot of money there now and a lot of dot com’s so it’s a little different than it used to be.
Les Claypool
I had gone from a small town in the eastern corner of India to San Francisco, and I was very lucky to get that.
Ritesh Agarwal
In the wake of the San Francisco scene, ears were alive. It was a listening generation.
Jimmy Page
Whether it’s Al Michaels, when the earthquake happened in San Francisco and his ability to handle it like Walter Cronkite would have handled it, or Bob Costas with his overview of what’s happening with worldly events at the Olympics and the perspective that he has there, you know these guys are so well read.
Cris Collinsworth
I’m based in San Francisco, although I don’t usually stay long in one place because we are always moving, we are always on the road. So most of the time, we stay in hotels.
Arnel Pineda
I remember the first club we played in San Francisco. There were a lot of people on motorcycles standing around outside, and I had trouble getting in. I didn’t have any ID, and the guy at the door wouldn’t let me in, even though I told him I was gonna be singing in there.
Patti Smith
I grew up in Marin County north of San Francisco, and in the 1950s and ’60s it was a natural paradise.
Huey Lewis
I like San Francisco, but I don't think I'd want to wor

I like San Francisco, but I don’t think I’d want to work in Palo Alto. It seems like a pretty rough commute. In many ways, I think New York has a lot of things the West Coast doesn’t have.
Jon Oringer
One winter, I went to Erfoud to research trilobites and got to know the quarries, the dealers, and the remote mining villages. They are not easy places to visit, and this was a completely unknown corner of the world economy: children slaving away on desert cliffs to furnish wealthy collectors in San Francisco.
Lawrence Osborne
San Francisco deserves to be a great bicycling city where every day is Bike to Work Day.
London Breed
I was born in New York. I grew up in San Francisco, Long Beach, and Los Angeles.
Tab Hunter
I don’t regret any of the places I went in football. Everything gave me an experience or memories that I’ll have forever. We had more success in San Francisco, but it was a great time everywhere. I always had fun.
Steve Young
I had a pretty normal, non-Hollywood life for most of my 20s in San Francisco.
Janet Varney
My grandfather was a survivor of the Death March and his war buddies were among our neighbors. Where we lived in San Francisco, there was a cultural center where the Filipinos congregate to have parties and to celebrate Bataan Day.
Dante Basco
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.
George Lucas
One of the nice things about the United States is that, wherever you go, people speak the same language. So native New Yorkers can move to San Francisco, Houston, or Milwaukee and still understand and be understood by everyone they meet. Right? Well, not exactly. Or, as a native New Yorker might put it, ‘Wrong!’
Deborah Tannen
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.
Willie McCovey
A lot of the people in Northern California and parts of Oregon have decided that we are not on the same page as San Francisco and Portland and Los Angeles. I don’t know if six states is a solution because is Washington, D.C. and the rest of the country really going to give California 10 new senators?
Doug LaMalfa
San Francisco has always been a great city for art collectors.
Larry Gagosian
Willie Roaf kicked my butt a couple of times. Larry Allen was a guard, but one time in San Francisco he took me with one hand and threw me out of the play. Walter Jones was pretty tough, too.
Terrell Suggs
What’s normal life for the majority people of America, the liberal press thinks is like, ‘Oh my gosh.’ We don’t live in that little, weird, bizarre vacuum of San Francisco.
Rick Harrison
I would still rather be in Silicon Alley. I like the West Coast also, but it’s sort of fragmented. You have companies in downtown San Francisco, companies in Mountain View, and people are driving between them all. It’s kind of nice in New York to just jump in a cab and reach another company so easily.
Jon Oringer
In San Francisco, I lived in Bayview-Hunters Point.
Hunx
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
In the spring of 2012, I moved to the San Francisco bay area with my wife and two young sons.
Steve Hilton
I love San Francisco. I have a lot of memories there.
Rosalynn Carter
As Mayor, I will use my experience to make San Francisco a place where small businesses can thrive.
Gavin Newsom
When we finished ‘Stop Making Sense,’ we went right to the San Francisco Film Festival for the world premiere, and people swarmed the stage and started dancing before the first song was even finished.
Jonathan Demme
It’s funny, but when there are dominant teams, there are a number of people who rail about the fact that they’re always seeing the Dallas Cowboys or the San Francisco 49ers or the Green Bay either in the playoffs or in the Super Bowl.
Al Michaels
I remember I was in a San Francisco nightclub, and I started talking to some girl, and it was like, ‘Hey, what’s going on, what’s your name?’ You know, ‘Where are you from?’ I go, ‘I’m from Iran.’ And literally, she just looked at me and walked away.
Maz Jobrani
Old San Francisco – the one so many nostalgics yearn for – had buildings that related well to each other.
Herb Caen
We did a year of Uber in San Francisco before we went to a second city. You get those processes down, then you really get started.
Travis Kalanick
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.
Gavin Newsom
What we’re doing in San Francisco and what we’re doing with other criminal justice partners across the state and across the country is anything but indiscriminate. We are being careful. We are being focused and surgical in our efforts to decrease the jail population.
Chesa Boudin
San Francisco is the microcosm for what’s happening all over the world.
Alexandra C. Pelosi
When I was a kid I had a ball in San Francisco because my Uncle Lou was a gripman on the California cable car line.
Jackie Coogan
Just before my final year of high school, my brother, sister and I moved with my mother to San Francisco.
Eric Allin Cornell
I was raised in the country. I haven’t spent any time in the cities that people say are the best. I haven’t spent much time in Chicago or San Francisco.
Terry O’Quinn
When we first started Glitch, there were four co-founde

When we first started Glitch, there were four co-founders of the company. We built Flickr and worked together at Yahoo and then started Tiny Speck. We were split in Vancouver, New York, and San Francisco. So we used an old chat technology called IRC. Almost nothing went through email.
Stewart Butterfield
I know what it’s like to be from an incredibly small town and the oppressiveness of it and the desire to get out. But I didn’t realize that readers in Seattle, New York, and San Francisco might not get that so instinctively.
John Corey Whaley
The same music is playing on the radio in San Francisco, New York, Washington DC and Annapolis. Everywhere you go there’s the same artists and same songs by them, over and over again. At some stations they play the same songs 50 to 60 times a week.
John Hall
People are frustrated all over the country, whether they’re in Oklahoma or Oregon or San Diego or San Francisco or L.A. or D.C. or New York or Omaha or wherever.
Zal Batmanglij
We need housing for people who are exiting homelessness, and need to make sure we’re providing housing at multiple levels of care so people can get the services they need to permanently exit homelessness and make their home in San Francisco.
London Breed
I saw ‘The Shining’ when I was too young with my dad in San Francisco in the hotel room.
Daniel Zovatto
San Francisco is gone. Nothing remains of it but memories.
Jack London
When you work with web design companies in San Francisco, you end up with a bunch of twenty-somethings who have their own cultural peculiarities, including obscurity for its own sake. You give those guys a website for a banking institution and they screw it up, because they are designing for themselves.
Brenda Laurel
I surfed from Baja California to San Francisco when there were only nine or 10 surfers on the entire Pacific Coast. I spent three-month summer vacations in our High Sierra cabin 60 miles from the nearest road. I drank milk from my own ranch.
Jackie Coogan
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.
Michael Stipe
San Francisco is a city; L.A. is a collection of suburbs that have very little in common with one another.
Orson Bean
When my dad retired, he moved to Georgia, but I stayed in California. I was in San Francisco: that’s where I first went from being a musician to making beats and producing. I was 18, 19. It started going pretty good for me out there in California, so I stayed in SF while my parents moved to Georgia.
Zaytoven
When you play quarterback in San Francisco, not much goes under the radar.
Steve Young
In San Francisco, our diversity is our strength.
London Breed
I invested in Uber in 2011 when it was only in San Francisco.
Troy Carter
I think we need to show people that they have a place in the Democratic Party, whether they come from San Francisco or St. Louis.
Seth Moulton
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
I missed my entrance in a production of ‘Blade to the Heat’ at Thick Description in San Francisco. I came into the scene very late and hugged the punching bag. I had no idea what to do! Unfortunately, that mishap was recorded for archives at UC Berkeley. It goes down in history.
Colman Domingo
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.
Herb Caen
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
I worked for ‘The Chronicle’ in San Francisco, and immigration is a big issue in that region.
Jose Antonio Vargas
I’ve never worked in a retail store, but I did sell shoes at Gimme Shoes in San Francisco, a job I was fired from.
Sophia Amoruso
If there was a street synonymous with San Francisco, it’s Market Street. It is the everyday backbone of the City, with hundreds of thousands of people traveling along it on foot, bike, bus, or streetcar. It’s where we gather to celebrate our victories and protest injustices.
London Breed
We’d been living in the Arkansas Ozarks, then the Missouri Ozarks, because it is so inexpensive and does have natural wonders, but we shuffled things and moved to San Francisco, the corner of Dashiell Hammett and Pine.
Daniel Woodrell
I go up to San Francisco on holidays and spend time with my family there, but whenever I go to Japan, I enjoy every moment. I try to go back there every year or so. It’s a phenomenal place, and I absolutely love it. It’s not my second home; it is my home. Whenever I go back, I feel very connected with Japan.
Ryan Potter
In San Francisco, I eat halal, which is kind of like Muslim kosher, and there’s this one Thai restaurant, and it’s right next to the ‘Great American Hall’. I’m there all the time whenever I’m in town; that’s my spot.
Yuna
I’m originally from San Francisco. I might move there some day. But, I like L.A., I have fun in L.A. It’s a fun town if you’ve got money in your pocket. It’s a good town.
Sam Rockwell
I grew up in a San Francisco very different from what many have experienced: a place called Plaza East, notoriously one of the most dangerous public housing developments in the City.
London Breed
I run in London, in San Francisco – any city that’s got a waterfront or park.
Danny Meyer
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
My parents came to San Francisco when they were probably 19 or 20, in the mid-’60s.
Jon M. Chu
I did stand-up comedy for a long time in San Francisco,

I did stand-up comedy for a long time in San Francisco, and then I was like, ‘You know what? I’m going to move to Los Angeles and try and make it!’
Nico Santos
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
Schooling should not be left to the whim or wealth of village elders. I believe that we should fund all schools in the U.S. with our national resources. All these kids are being educated to be Americans, not citizens of Minneapolis or San Francisco.
Jonathan Kozol
I am committed to ensuring San Francisco remains a center for tech and the innovation capital of the world.
Aileen Lee
Making ribs in Texas isn’t that unusual a choice for ‘Top Chef’. We played the stereotypes everywhere we go. It’s not only in Texas. We do it in New York; we did it in San Francisco. Listen if we shoot it in Seattle you know we’re going to be throwing salmon somewhere.
Tom Colicchio
What draws us to a city like San Francisco is the same thing that draws entrepreneurs, startups, and freelancers to WeWork: it’s the creative atmosphere, the technical sophistication, and the strong sense of community.
Miguel McKelvey
I love that there are beaches you can walk your dog on in San Francisco. Fort Funston is big and always packed with hundreds of dogs and their people. A great place to hike and get some exercise and fresh air with your well-mannered pup. Not recommended for antisocial dogs; there’s just too much commotion there.
Jane Wiedlin
My brother and I used to collect comic books in San Francisco.
Benjamin Bratt
I used to travel in tennis shoes; I am just not allowed to anymore. I’m an old hippie from San Francisco.
Amy Irving
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
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.
Anne Lamott
One of the reasons I moved to San Francisco was the weather. And then I realized that I really don’t like being outside.
Sarah Cooper
San Francisco is not a boutique – it’s a center of commerce.
Alexandra C. Pelosi
San Francisco, coolest place ever.
Imogen Poots
I messed around in high school, but I pretty much put it away until I did a television show in San Francisco.
Gary Cole
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
Those who survived the San Francisco earthquake said, ‘Thank God, I’m still alive.’ But, of course, those who died, their lives will never be the same again.
Barbara Boxer
It was totally insane doing goat yoga in San Francisco.
Gino D’Acampo
The Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco is for the community of San Francisco. And the Brooklyn Bridge, which is one of the most magnificent bridges ever built, is also a monument to the community, you see.
Santiago Calatrava
Nothing important has ever come out of San Francisco, Rice-a-Roni aside.
Michael O’Donoghue
I was approached by a company in San Francisco called Fantex. I did my due diligence on it. I tried to outweigh the pros and cons. Then I just made a business decision.
Vernon Davis
I went to college at San Francisco State and supported myself working the graveyard shift at a brewery and did a little theater. It was great. I’d do Shakespeare and stuff like that.
David Carradine
Homelessness isn’t just an issue in San Francisco. It’s an issue throughout California and up and down the West Coast. We need to support policies that address our twin troubles of housing affordability and homelessness at the state-level.
London Breed
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 Boosler
I’ve always wanted to do a big theater show in San Francisco.
Bonobo
I live in San Francisco, and I love it.
Ayesha Curry
Work does come home with us, but home also comes to work. Our kids are regulars at Eventbrite’s HQ in San Francisco.
Julia Hartz
Homelessness and behavioral health challenges affect every neighborhood in San Francisco.
London Breed
San Francisco is a City for everyone and our government needs to work for all of our residents.
London Breed
I love San Francisco; it’s very hard to compete with San Francisco when it comes to availability of product, but one thing you can’t replace about Las Vegas or Miami is people are walking in the door and they want to have a good time.
Michael Mina
I got a bike – a fixed-gear with bright blue wheels, custom-made to my specifications. I am a San Francisco techno-hipster, so this selection was a bit of a self-caricature. But sometimes the predictable thing turns out to be the best thing, too, and you can’t let that stop you.
Robin Sloan
I'm working class, my family was working class, and we

I’m working class, my family was working class, and we have struggled the same way our neighbors here in San Francisco have struggled.
Cindy Sheehan
I grew up in Vancouver, which is a pretty liberal, gay Mecca of the West coast. There’s San Francisco, and then there’s Vancouver.
Avan Jogia
In San Francisco, I found Warren Levinson, who had set up a program to study Rous Sarcoma Virus, an archetype for what we now call retroviruses. At the time, the replication of retroviruses was one of the great puzzles of animal virology. Levinson, Levintow and I joined forces in the hope of solving that puzzle.
J. Michael Bishop
I was inspired to see leaders from Paris, New York City, San Francisco and Vancouver, B.C. rolling up their sleeves to create clean and safe transportation systems; make homes and buildings efficient, comfortable and affordable; and ensure more of our energy comes from clean sources like wind and solar.
Ted Wheeler
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.
Patton Oswalt
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.
Ruth Bernhard
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
Sometime ago, I went for a film festival in San Francisco and that’s where I met film director Warren Foster and actors Robert Parham and Randy Taylor, by chance.
Babu Antony
We don’t know, ultimately, if we’ll end up in San Francisco, but we’re talking about keeping the house. It would be nice to always have a place here.
Matt Cain
I brag like hell when I’m confident of what I’m doing. Back when I was sailing ships for a living, I would take a schooner up to San Francisco – I had my master’s certificate at 22 – and I would tell myself, ‘There isn’t a man in the world can do this better ‘n I can.’ And I meant it.
Sterling Hayden
I knew that if I had an opportunity to play out the majority of my career in San Francisco, and hopefully my whole career in San Francisco, that was – it was an easy call for me.
Buster Posey
I wanted to be an architect, and I ended up at my job in San Francisco, and if you would have asked me then, that was one of the greatest jobs that had happened to me in terms of my career.
Yahya Abdul-Mateen II
My sister and I were born in San Francisco. When our parents died, we came down here to live with relatives.
Freddy Fender
I’ve never had a problem finding a team, a league, or a pickup game. Actually, I’m not sure I want soccer to get bigger. We have so many teams in San Francisco that there aren’t enough fields.
Rabih Alameddine
San Francisco is perhaps the most European of all American cities.
Cecil Beaton
I’ve always just felt a little out of place. I still feel out of place in San Francisco. It’s this place where everything is going great, and everyone feels super optimistic about the world. It’s a little different about how I grew up.
J. D. Vance
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
My home is San Francisco – that is definitely what I consider my home.
Winona Ryder
Why can’t DFW compete like San Francisco does with Oakland, like Miami does with Fort Lauderdale, and like Chicago O’Hare does with Midway?
John Ensign
I live in a condo outside of San Francisco, in a town called Larkspur, near a marine area.
Dominique Crenn
A little dark chocolate in small amounts often helps lift me out of those blue moments. When I walk into my favorite store on Union Street in San Francisco that sells high-quality chocolates from around the world, I feel like, well, a kid in a candy store.
Dean Ornish
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.
Dennis Crowley
The thing you gotta understand about L.A. is that everything is suburbia. Los Angeles isn’t set up like San Francisco or New York.
Rick Famuyiwa
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.
Feist
Being gay in San Francisco is fun. Being gay in Saudi Arabia – that’s a whole other matter.
Gilbert Baker
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
In the 1960s, as a rising defense intellectual, Kissinger was a Nelson Rockefeller man, firmly entrenched in the center-right establishment. When he attended the infamous 1964 Republican convention in San Francisco, he was horrified by Goldwater supporters, whom he likened to fascists.
Greg Grandin
We need more housing in San Francisco, plain and simple, and we especially need more affordable housing for our low-income households, seniors, teachers, formerly homeless people, veterans, and middle-income residents.
London Breed
I was living in San Francisco so I got back into yoga, bought myself a mountain bike and a puppy, and started living my life. And incidentally, I started making a record without realising it.
Darren Hayes
When I was growing up in San Francisco, one of the experiences that changed my life was my first paid internship – a summer job at The Family School.
London Breed
Walking the streets of San Francisco can be a frightening, demoralizing, even an unhealthy experience for residents and tourists alike.
London Breed
You see 6,000 times more tech companies in San Francisc

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
I love San Francisco!
Fred Willard
We got a lot of gay fan mail when the show first started. Something to do with being in San Francisco and being a big, burly guy with a big moustache. But we’re both happily married. To women.
Jamie Hyneman
Harvey Milk was a friend of mine, an important gay leader in San Francisco in the ’70s, and he carried a really important message about how important it was to be visible, how important it was to come out, and that was the single most important thing we had to do.
Gilbert Baker
There was a Japantown in San Francisco, but after the internment camps that locked up all the Japanese, Japantown shrunk down to just a couple tourist blocks.
Ann Nocenti
In sports, the confluence of the 1989 Oakland vs. San Francisco World Series and the Loma Prieta earthquake notwithstanding, the earth rarely moves.
John Gregory Dunne
I am most proud of what sfCiti has accomplished with the ‘Circle the Schools’ program, which engages companies to enter into long-term partnerships with San Francisco public schools, using an adopt-a-school model.
Ron Conway
I think San Francisco is the best place in the whole world for an easy life.
Imogen Cunningham
That’s one of the things I like about San Francisco. It’s not like anywhere else in the world.
Tracy Chapman
During the 1990s, San Francisco lived through one of the most intense economic booms of its history.
Gavin Newsom
I was an apprentice at the San Francisco Ballet, and a casting director came to one of our rehearsals to scout talent for ‘Center Stage.’ I landed the role of Jodie.
Amanda Schull
The music I was really listening to in 1968 was James Brown, the great guitar player Jimi Hendrix, and a new group… Sly and the Family Stone, led by Sly Stewart from San Francisco.
Miles Davis
San Francisco is like, the most expensive city to live in, in the United States.
Patti Harrison
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
I come from a school of artists, the Mission School in San Francisco, and there are a lot of artists I look up to.
Devendra Banhart
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
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.
Noah Hawley
My dream is to retire as a San Francisco 49er.
Vernon Davis
I grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas, and before the Internet and before everything, just to get anything interesting, you had to go on vacation to San Francisco or something. But I think when you’re in the middle of America, you feel very jealous of not just comedy but music that you don’t have access to.
Matt Besser
I think I had heard Al Di Meola on the radio when I was a kid, that acoustic record, ‘Friday Night In San Francisco,’ with Paco de Lucía and John McLaughlin. His picking was unbelievable. I thought it was incredible.
Paul Gilbert
There’s no point in us designing synthetic laboratories that could just as well be in Dusseldorf or Helsinki. San Francisco has its light, which must be used.
Mario Botta
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
Few cities have been more definitely impressed upon the imagination of the world than San Francisco, this gray-hilled city on the peninsula by the hospitable bay, where Saint Francis protects the ships as he protected the birds of Assisi.
Edwin Markham
The sheer sensory experience of San Francisco is unlike anywhere else. Not just the physical beauty, but the textures, the feel, the wind, the ocean. It’s a monumental feeling unrivaled by anywhere else. Its a world class, gorgeous city. And the coffee is great.
Jennifer Egan
If we do high-speed rail, the governor has to be intelligent and invest the dollars at the ‘bookends’ – San Francisco and Los Angeles.
Kevin de Leon
Liberals want to live downtown. All over America – in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Georgetown – there are crowds of liberals living in the gritty, ugly, dirty neighborhoods sensible people are trying to flee.
P. J. O’Rourke
At the end of the day, I live in Silicon Valley and L.A., and for selfish reasons, I’d love to have Los Angeles and San Francisco connected with the Hyperloop.
Shervin Pishevar
I used to be a street singer in San Francisco.
Gedde Watanabe
San Francisco businesses face many challenges, including high rents, regulatory burdens, and the rising cost of workers compensation insurance and employee health plans.
Gavin Newsom
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.
Ed Lee
I initially moved to San Francisco to become a research associate for one of the top young heart surgeons in the country. Everything that I learned in that position is that skills, talent, and expertise are transferable.
Chris Gardner
My problems seemed so glamorous to other people, and ev

My problems seemed so glamorous to other people, and everyone just thought I was so lucky. But then, I was lucky because my family was really there for me – San Francisco was a real refuge.
Winona Ryder
Although the flagship brand, Pepsi-Cola, has always been second to Coca-Cola, the Frito-Lay division is ten times larger than its largest competitor, Diamond Foods, Inc., of San Francisco. Its products take up whole aisles at Walmart.
John Seabrook
The status quo tough-on-crime policies of the ’90s and 2000s are not working and are not popular. And it provides me with hope about the possibilities for San Francisco and this whole country in terms of moving away from our dependence on prisons and jails to solve social problems.
Chesa Boudin
The environment of San Francisco has so much history to it that I really appreciate. Musically, socially, and culturally. There’s this new culture of people; it’s a crazy place to be.
GRiZ
As a person of color from the South, San Francisco was the first city that really made me feel like an other.
Barry Jenkins
San Francisco is a great startup community that you shouldn’t even try to model yourself after because it’s just special.
David Cohen
If I had it my way, I never would have left San Francisco, but things change and that’s the nature of this business. We have to move on. We hopefully get opportunities down the road that we take advantage of.
Jeff Garcia
People always thought I’d never get elected outside San Francisco; I was always more worried that I’d never get elected again inside San Francisco.
Gavin Newsom
I arrived in the U.S.A. in 1935, to San Francisco. I got the boat from China, and I didn’t even speak English. I could read a little, perhaps write a little, but that was all. It was a 17-day journey, and I learnt to speak English from the stewards.
I. M. Pei
Sometimes I wonder if I’m just memorializing my youth when I spent all this time outdoors. I always envisioned my adult life like I’m going to run every day and live in the woods in a cabin if I can – and here I am living in San Francisco and working in a studio.
Tycho
I have this insane and unabated longing for San Francisco. I come up there every chance that I get.
Aisha Tyler
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.
Greg Fitzsimmons
New York and San Francisco are distinctly different. San Francisco is driving the American media, not New York. You have young, microwaved millionaires and billionaires reshaping the American media in a way that reflects San Francisco values.
Jason Whitlock
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
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.
Tadashi Yanai
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.
Charles Hazlewood
When you come to San Francisco, we want you to know where Salesforce is.
Parker Harris
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.
Boz Scaggs
I had a terrible motorcycle accident, in San Francisco as matter of fact. Doing a picture called… oh, this is terrible. It’s a very well-known film and I can’t remember the name. That’s what happens when you get older… I fell off a bridge in San Francisco and was laid up for two years.
William Lucking
In our works at Bethlehem and San Francisco, and all over the United States, I adopted this system: I pay the managers practically no salary. I make them partners in the business, only I don’t let them share in the efforts of any other man.
Charles M. Schwab
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.
Lynn Jurich
I was a San Francisco fan when Joe Montana and Ronnie Lott and those guys where there. And I watched Joe Montana get cut and go to K.C. and still ball.
Ed Reed
After Survivor, I was driving across country and moving to San Francisco, going to get a job interning at an ad agency. And then they asked me to read for this movie.
Colleen Haskell
Boulder was not the small town I had expected. It is a vivacious community of sophisticated people, who have the same aspirations and expectations you find in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Kimbal Musk
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
I spent two years making music in San Francisco for my first mixtape. Initially, I was not at all doing this to be a professional rapper, a touring rapper. I didn’t think I had that talent level in me.
Lil Dicky
I want to give every victim of every crime in San Francisco the right to participate in restorative justice if they choose to.
Chesa Boudin
America loses so much of what defines it if you subtract the Chinese influence. I know this because I spent 12 years living in one of America’s most popular tourist destinations: San Francisco. And it would not be one of America’s top tourist destinations without Chinatown.
W. Kamau Bell
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.
Iris Chang
When I was nine, we moved to Stanford University in San Francisco so that my father could do a Ph.D. I went to Terman Junior High in Palo Alto. It was terrible, because my hormones were all over the place, and I became an ugly adolescent full of rage and loathing.
Caroline Lawrence
I’ve got one of those over-stuffed leather chairs from the Pottery Barn. It faces north. I live in San Francisco, so there’s the Golden Gate Bridge off to the left, and there’s Alcatraz off to the right, and I’ve got a pile of pulp fiction next to me, and there’s usually a decent bottle of red wine next to the fireplace.
Mike Rowe
Fighting for tenants' rights has never been about polit

Fighting for tenants’ rights has never been about political posturing for me. It’s very personal. It’s why I fight for everyone who’s struggling to stay in San Francisco.
London Breed
I forgot that San Francisco is not an angry city like New York. Gays have gotten what they wanted there over the years, unlike New York, where we had to fight for everything.
Larry Kramer
Chicago is constantly auditioning for the world, determined that one day, on the streets of Barcelona, in Berlin’s cabarets, in the coffee shops of Istanbul, people will know and love us in our multidimensional glory, dream of us the way they dream of San Francisco and New York.
Mary Schmich
Imagine for a second that the Golden Gate had not been built. This place in the San Francisco Bay would be one of the many beautiful places along the Pacific Coast – but that’s all. Once you put the bridge there, you distinguish it from any other place in the world.
Santiago Calatrava
My claim to fame has always been that iconic picture that ended up in ‘The San Francisco Chronicle’ of Bill Russell jumping over my head.
Johnny Mathis
I don’t know how it plays in San Francisco. But I can tell you I came out, during a reelection campaign, in Indiana, while Mike Pence was the governor. And I wound up winning reelection by 80 percent.
Pete Buttigieg
A lot of the stories about urban America tend to be written on the margins. We focus a lot on these big global cities – New York, San Francisco – or we focus on cities that are having the toughest time – Detroit, Newark, Camden.
Matthew Desmond
I got lucky. I won the San Francisco Stand-Up Comedy Competition in 1977 while I was still at San Francisco State.
Dana Carvey
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
I love San Francisco so much. I call it the Emerald City and have been coming here since 1992. I have a few old friends that live here, and my aunt and uncle live in Oakland. I think it’s a magical city – it’s big, sexy and very ‘cosmo’ with a small-town feel.
Andy Cohen
San Francisco is a lot like Amsterdam – free, open-minded and casual – though I expected better weather.
Marcel Wanders
I always want to have San Francisco as my home and my base. I’m a business reporter – that’s what I do and what I enjoy – and I don’t know another place on the planet that would be as fascinating to cover.
Sarah Lacy
Starting a company in San Francisco when we did usually meant it was destined to be a data-driven tech company. But that didn’t seem to fully encompass what we wanted with Airbnb. When we tried looking through a tech lens, it didn’t work. The humanity was missing.
Joe Gebbia
I’ve got more chins than a San Francisco phonebook.
Bruce Vilanch
I’m a huge fan of the Bay Area so I always love coming to San Francisco.
Ezra Koenig
I love San Francisco!
Willam Belli
As mayor of San Francisco, I will provide the vision and work hard to make San Francisco a beautiful, well-planned city with excellent housing and transportation options.
Gavin Newsom
In college, I stopped doing pre-med and went into theater, and then I moved to San Francisco and lived there for five years.
Mark Waters
I thought art was dead rabbits hanging by their feet on a wall. I went to Italy and saw all the religious paintings, and they didn’t move me all that much. Then someone invited me to see this van Gogh exhibit at the Rosenberg Gallery in San Francisco.
Irving Stone
I wish the city of San Francisco, bastion of liberalism, were more innovative when it comes to how to spread the wealth.
Leila Janah
I love San Francisco for the music culture. There’s this vibe there that I can’t find anywhere else in the world. Easily one of the best places on the sea coast.
Tash Sultana
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.
Anthony Mackie
I think I have femininity, I have masculinity, but I get to use all of Jeffrey, and that’s very powerful. And this is what I always thought when I went down in my little basement in San Francisco, where I grew up, and daydreamed about being an actor: It felt like this. This is what it felt like.
Jeffrey Tambor
Actually, have you ever heard Sylvester’s live version of ‘Mighty Real’ that was recorded in San Francisco? If I listen to that, I never fail to get goose bumps all over. I go crazy. That song just makes me so emotional.
Jimmy Somerville
Access to quality early care and education is an important part of our efforts to make San Francisco more equitable, and ensure that every child who grows up here can thrive.
London Breed
I grew up in San Francisco in the 1970s. We were part of a church that belonged to the California Jesus movement.
Sara Zarr
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
I knew San Francisco when it was a wild place during Prohibition. There were more speakeasies than churches, and you could always get a drink.
Jackie Coogan
When I was 16, my dad took me to a DNA conference at the Exploratorium science museum in San Francisco, California, and I was captivated by this way of looking at biology and by the discussions of bits of nucleic acid that could make us sick.
Kathleen Rubins
I want to make sure we are spending wisely and using our resources effectively to address the issues facing San Francisco, while reaching residents throughout our entire City.
London Breed
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
In January 2013, I told the people in the Justice Depar

In January 2013, I told the people in the Justice Department after the re-election that I wanted to focus on reforming the federal criminal justice system. I made an announcement in August of that year in San Francisco, when we rolled out the Smart on Crime initiative.
Eric Holder
San Francisco is a beacon of hope for LGBTQ people around the world.
London Breed
The good thing about being in San Francisco is it’s a city that seems to have the flexibility and undefined boundaries.
Janet Varney
It’s weird, when I go back to San Francisco, the few times that I’ve done shows there since leaving, it still feels like I live there. It’s very, very strange for me. That’s where my daughter was born, at UCSF. I have this huge attachment to San Francisco. It’s like a love affair.
Kaskade
I love San Francisco more than any other city outside of Seattle, but I’ve seen it go from a vibrant, creative community to a playground for tech bros.
Ben Gibbard
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.
Peter Coyote
San Francisco is a place that stands up for our LGBTQ communities.
London Breed
Google has already tested robot cars in San Francisco. If they can navigate San Francisco, they can probably manage just about anywhere.
Norman Foster
I didn’t like Los Angeles very much but I like San Francisco.
Mick Ralphs
I’m Dominique Crenn. I’m a chef, entrepreneur, artist, poet, human being. I have three restaurants in San Francisco: Atelier Crenn, Bar Crenn and Petit Crenn.
Dominique Crenn
If we don’t preserve the natural resources, you aren’t going to have a sustainable society. This is not something for Chez Panisse and the elite of San Francisco. It’s for everyone.
Alice Waters
Getting around San Francisco should be convenient, safe, affordable, and sustainable.
London Breed
In 2004, results from a study that I worked on with colleagues at the University of California, San Francisco, linked chronic stress to shortening of telomeres.
Elizabeth Blackburn
I think maybe L.A. or San Francisco could be rushed, but Sacramento is just laid back!
Nick Johnson
Ramen in L.A. is much better than ramen in San Francisco. That’s just a fact.
Alexis Ohanian
Families in Logan, West Virginia, were going through the same struggles as families in the Bronx, San Francisco, and Houston. This was not a West Virginia problem. This is an American problem, and it has to change.
Richard Ojeda
I move between San Francisco and Paris… I have a wonderful beach house in California.
Danielle Steel
I have no desire to go back to San Francisco.
Sara Zarr
I didn’t come from the elites. I didn’t come from the Northeast or from San Francisco. I came from a southern Ohio steel town, and it’s a town that’s really struggling in a lot of ways, ways that are indicative of the broader struggles of America’s working class.
J. D. Vance
I grew up in Oregon, and then I lived in San Francisco and New York.
Rachel Kushner
People in San Francisco and the East Bay have shown interest, done interviews, and have come to shows. I guess that the news travels fast out of this island that we are on.
Joanna Newsom
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.
Michael Tilson Thomas
San Francisco. The one team that everyone in LA hates.
Jeremy Sumpter
I do think your environment really plays into how you create. I lived in San Francisco for a bit, and I felt like I lived in the Matrix – so my music had that paranoid-of-the-outside sound to it.
Flying Lotus
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
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
I kept being told, ‘If you really want to build a start up, you have to be in San Francisco,’ so I ended up taking out a suitcase. It did occur to me to do it in London but it’s very, very difficult to build a start up in London – so I guess I was being lazy.
Ruzwana Bashir
I was obsessed with The Who. I would have accepted a marriage proposal from Roger Daltrey on the spot. I went to all of their shows in San Francisco and some in L.A. That was as close as I got to being a groupie.
Jennifer Egan
I lived in San Francisco and did the Stegner fellowship for two years, and it was amazing. From fall 2008 to spring 2010, I was there.
Jesmyn Ward
After I finished ‘Center Stage,’ I went back to San Francisco, and I danced for seven seasons with the San Francisco Ballet.
Amanda Schull
A lot of the people in San Francisco think of themselves as healers – not just as people delivering this base service, but giving their clients spiritual help. It’s almost like being an actor, playing a different part for each trick.
James Franco
I grew up in San Francisco, and I trained as a ballet d

I grew up in San Francisco, and I trained as a ballet dancer until college.
Chloe Benjamin
There are old people in San Francisco because my parents still live there. The young tech bros don’t see old people or children. The Mission district, where they live and work, they don’t see children or old people. That statement revealed, to me, the blinders that the techies are wearing.
Alexandra C. Pelosi
It was great starting in San Francisco. I really think it’s is the best place to start in the country.
Moshe Kasher
For 25 years, it has been my privilege to represent the city of San Francisco and the great state of California; to work to strengthen our vibrant middle class; to secure opportunity and equality.
Nancy Pelosi
I had decided on L.A. because I felt like I could handle the cost of living out there. It was just too difficult in San Francisco and New York.
Gina Schock
Setting San Francisco on a course to sustainability will require all of us to work in concert on a number of ambitious efforts.
London Breed
When I was a prosecutor in San Francisco I would get advice on trying cases from public defenders and defense attorneys.
Christine Pelosi
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.
Rene Cassin
I don’t know many better training grounds than being mayor of San Francisco – those were pretty intense years in terms of reporting and scrutiny.
Gavin Newsom
I grew up in Marin County, which is a wealthy suburb of San Francisco.
Alicia Garza
I didn’t really start writing music or lyrics or turning them into songs until I went to San Francisco.
Jello Biafra
I’ve been lucky to conduct the very best orchestras in the world: New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Berlin, the London Philharmonic.
Itzhak Perlman
San Francisco is a wonderful city, but you do have housing issues. If tech companies don’t do the right thing, they can dislocate a lot of what makes San Francisco special. At Workday, we want to be on the right side of that.
Aneel Bhusri
When I went to San Francisco in that cold late spring of 1967, I did not even know what I wanted to find out, and so I just stayed around a while and made a few friends.
Joan Didion
In Tennessee, you can live off fast food. It’s everywhere… But it’s nowhere in San Francisco, and I didn’t know how to navigate the city to eat.
Matt Cain
We need a coordinated, citywide approach to make sure that everyone in San Francisco is sheltered and has access to the care they need.
London Breed
We tend to prefer candidates that don’t talk about us one way in Scranton and another way in San Francisco.
Sarah Palin
Should hostilities once break out between Japan and the United States, it is not enough that we take Guam and the Philippines, nor even Hawaii and San Francisco. We would have to march into Washington and sign the treaty in the White House.
Isoroku Yamamoto
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
I happen to be fortunate: I live in San Francisco, and I can afford a $600 phone. Or two of them!
Robert Scoble
With commitment and the right investments, we can create a San Francisco where no one is forced, relegated, or allowed to sleep on the streets, and where no one endures addiction or mental illness on the streets without supportive and effective services.
London Breed