whatever San Francisco is or is not, it is never dull. Life there is in a perpetual ferment. It is as though the city kettle had been set on the stove to boil half a century ago and had never been taken off. The steam is pouring out of the nose. The cover is dancing up and down. The very kettle is rocking and jumping. But by some miracle the destructive explosion never happens.

It is a racking thing to have a plague of ideas and no chance to get rid of them on paper. I've nearly gone mad at times.

California ... produces the maximum of scenery and the minimum of weather.

Genius is a good deal like the sea ... Nothing can restrain its tide or quicken it.

there's no art but has some business to it and no business but some art.

California, where the spring comes in the fall and the fall comes in the summer and the summer comes in the winter and the winter never comes at all.

Perhaps after all the most breathtaking quality about San Francisco is these unexpected glimpses that you are always getting of beautiful hill-heights and beautiful valley-depths. ... City lights, like nests of diamonds, glitter and glisten in the depths of those valleys.