Herb Caen

A city is a state - of mind, of taste, of opportunity. A city is a marketplace - where ideas are traded, opinions clash and eternal conflict may produce eternal truths.

I have a memory like an elephant. I remember every elephant I've ever met.

When a place advertises itself as 'World Famous,' you may be sure it isn't.

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.

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.

San Franciscans have a bond of self-satisfaction bordering on smugness.

Logic is no answer to passion.

I tend to live in the past because most of my life is there.

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.

Americans are pragmatic, relatively uncomplicated, hearty and given to broad humor.

Satire of satire tends to be self-canceling, and deliberate shock tactics soon lose their ability to shock, especially when they're too deliberate.