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.'

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

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.

A city is a crazy concrete jungle whose people at the end of each day somehow make a small step ahead against terrible odds.

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.

I sometimes worry about my short attention span, but not for long.