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.

I used to travel in tennis shoes; I am just not allowed to anymore. I'm an old hippie from San Francisco.

Whether an economic boom is fueled by the fashion industry or technology innovations, it needs a brick-and-mortar foundation. This is not only true in New York and San Francisco; wherever you live, you can find a local hotspot positioned to attract interest from businesses, consumers and investors.

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.

I went to school in California, at Stanford when I was seventeen, and I lived in San Francisco until I was twenty-three, and then I lived in Hungary for, like, a summer, and then I went to Iowa for three years. At Iowa, I actually did the fiction program, not poetry. I was a fiction writer for a long time before I was 'out' as a poet.

In Zurich, in a cafe overlooking the Limmat, I ate butter-drenched white asparagus pulled from the ground that morning; it had the aftertaste of champagne. I've been able to appreciate epic meals in San Francisco, New Orleans, Berlin, Paris, Las Vegas.

If I was applying for a legal position, I would highlight my experience working for the San Francisco-L.A. DA's office, and I would mention some of the high-profile cases I did, but if I was looking for another television job, I would gloss over that, and I'd mention the highlight reel of what I did in television.

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.'

I went to the University of San Francisco on an athletic scholarship. I didn't study in high school. I was just there to get by and to play basketball. But a funny thing happened to me when I got to college. I got challenged by the work and the professors.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We are very proud of our design for the Transbay Transit Center. This will be a beautiful, functional and sustainable building for San Francisco.

I used to do people's online dating for them. I had clients in San Francisco, L.A., New York and they'd pay me $800 a month to basically make them profiles on all the best websites for the demographics for them.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

"The San Francisco therapist kept telling me I shouldn't be terrified of creative experimentation.

Then, on a blustery evening in October 2017, the worst wildfires in modern state history ignited. They ripped across Northern California, pushed by the Diablo Winds. The infernos killed 44 people and hospitalized another 192. They incinerated fabled vineyards and the working-class Santa Rosa neighborhood of Coffey Park. People died in swimming pools, in mobile home parks, in their bedrooms and their cars. A fourteen-year-old perished at the end of his family's driveway, unable to outrun the flames. PG&E was held responsible for seventeen of the twenty-one wildfires-which burned an area eight times the size of San Francisco-though the company escaped blame for the worst of the bunch.

No writing is wasted. Did you know that sourdough from San Francisco is leavened partly by a bacteria called lactobacillus sanfrancisensis? It is native to the soil there, and does not do well elsewhere. But any kitchen can become an ecosystem. If you bake a lot, your kitchen will become a happy home to wild yeasts, and all your bread will taste better. Even a failed loaf is not wasted. Likewise, cheese makers wash the dairy floor with whey. Tomato gardeners compost with rotten tomatoes. No writing is wasted: the words you can't put in your book can wash the floor, live in the soil, lurk around in the air. They will make the next words better.

"Zeena's first published sermon at 7 years old. From "The Cloven Hoof" periodical, 1970, San Francisco, CA, USA.: