Quotes About Chicago

I'm from Chicago, my family started a chain of movie theaters in Chicago that were around for 70 years and then one of them became the head of Paramount and the other was the head of production at MGM and we all came out of Chicago.

Chicago still remains a Mecca of the Midwest - people from both coasts are kind of amazed how good life is in Chicago, and what a good culture we've got. You can have a pretty wonderful artistic life and never leave Chicago.

Anywhere in the world you hear a Chicago bluesman play, it's a Chicago sound born and bred.

I enjoyed living in Chicago and doing plays for little or no money. I never actually thought that I would leave Chicago, originally. I wasn't one of those people that had a plan to pack up the van and drive out to Hollywood. I didn't want to.

I'm from Chicago, so the Chicago working-class poets still mean a great deal to me.

Well, I think one of the reasons Chicago became so popular as a filmmaker location is because New York had been used so many times that Chicago, I think, was rediscovered maybe in the late '60s, early '70s for a long time as a new location.

Congratulation s to Rahm Emanuel on being elected mayor of Chicago. His first order of business after taking office will be to actually move to Chicago.

Chicago is like a warzone. Chicago is worse than some of the people that you report, in some of the places that you report about every night, in the Middle East.

Chicago is not the most corrupt American city. It's the most theatrically corrupt.

When you go into a college of education you've got aspirations of making a difference in people's lives, of loving children, of working with kids, but none of that is affirmed in your college of education. Then you go working in schools, especially in places like New York City and Chicago that I'm most familiar with, and you find these huge aspirations are beaten out of you in a very systematic way - and still people persevere.

Because I grew up in Chicago, I didn't have an emotional relationship to segregation. I understood the facts and stories, but there was not an emotional relationship.

(Chicago is) the only major city in the country where you can easily buy your way out of a murder rap.

The stuff that I'm saying, they're not really traditional, structured jokes. It's not like I'm talking about growing up in Chicago or anything remotely close to that. It's basically me juggling words and concepts and phrases and being stupid.

Some of the best cooks that I've cooked with, whether it's in New York or Chicago or even here in Philadelphia, are actually Ecuadorians. And there's something about their palates that really just inspires me, and has a really deep sense of flavor.

I grew up in Los Angeles, and I've made movies all over the world... I've been in New York, Norway, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, London - I've been in all these cities, shooting away in the winter, thinking, 'People who choose to live here are insane.

It was impossible for me to believe that conditions in Europe could be worse than they were in the Polish section of Chicago, and in many Italian and Irish tenements, or that any workshops could be worse than some of those I had seen in our foreign quarters.

I'm always going to get more of a charge playing Chicago than I will Duluth or some place like that. Just because of the history and the people there are way more knowledgeable than a lot of other cities. It's an amazing music scene with some great bands and great musicians.

I was born out west but later on I migrated to the east side of Chicago. That's where my roots are at. I've been over east for more than ten years.

Fancy a novel about Chicago or Buffalo, let us say, or Nashville, Tennessee! There are just three big cities in the United States that are 'story cities'- New York, of course, New Orleans, and, best of the lot, San Francisco.

I went to the Goodman School of Drama in Chicago.

I was in a real conservative area just outside of Chicago recently. And this guy's like, 'Hey, Arj, you're from San Francisco. Are you in favor of gay marriage?' I was like, 'Well, I'd like to get to know you a little bit better first. I don't know what ever happened to buying a guy a smoothie and seeing what happens. That's how we do it back home.

First of all, I'm a Midwesterner, being from Kansas, and Chicago is basically a big Midwestern cow town. It was built from the stockyards, and everyone is very friendly, and it's at the edge of the tallgrass prairie. There's just a good feel to it.

Chicago gave me more music than any other city in America.

To have a strong community of people who believe in your potential can make all the difference in the world. So many people have invested in me and I want to do the same for Chicago’s teens.

I grew up in Chicago and was a huge fan of 'The Second City', so when I moved to L.A., I was looking for anything that resembled that... then I started 'The Groundlings', so I went to a show and it was very much like 'Second City'. I was so impressed that that same night I went backstage and I went up to the funniest person there.

Everyone is so concerned now where all of the candidates are born. McCain was born on a military base in Panama. Hillary was born outside Chicago, and if you believe the media, Barack Obama was born in a manger.

Milton Friedman had the grace and good sense to recognize that he wanted to talk to the general public. He wasn't going to just lecture to the people who happened to appear in his classroom in Chicago or on some lecture circuit. He went out to talk to the general public, believing that you had to convince a democratic nation to change its ways, and he succeeded to a considerable extent.

I miss everything about Chicago, except January and February.

What city has given the world more in terms of American culture than New Orleans? There is none. Not New York. Not L.A. Not Chicago. Not anywhere, in the sense that African American music has gone around the world twenty times over, and it's continuing to evolve. It is our greatest cultural export.

The central question of the Chicago conference was whether the mechanisms underlying microevolution can be extrapolated to explain the phenomena of macroevolution. At the risk of doing violence to the positions of some of the people at the meeting, the answer can be given as a clear No.

Mea culpa, mea culpa. MIT and Wharton and University of Chicago created the financial engineering instruments, which, like Samson and Delilah, blinded every CEO. They didn't realize the kind of leverage they were doing and they didn't understand when they were really creating a real profit or a fictitious one.

I used to go and do some sitting in with Robert Nighthawk when he were playing at the 708 Club in Chicago. He was a tremendous slideman. I never saw him do anything other than play the slide. I never just saw him just use his hand. He always used a slide. He had a little-bitty drummer we called "Shorty". He was about that high [hand gesture]. And he was his drummer. That's all he had was a slide guitar and a drummer.

We stayed on at the Institute [Chicago called the School of Design] because that was - I don't know, you start at one place and you stay there, I guess. Inertia takes over.

George Saunders is outside of Chicago too. I've met him a few times, actually. I really like him a lot. He's a really sweet guy. He's a big fan of my music now, too. I spent an enormous amount of time reading his work.

Could anything be more indicative of a slight but general insanity than the aspect of the crowd on the streets of Chicago?

I have defended the interests of France at the G8 in Washington; afterwards I was at Chicago to announce the withdrawal of French troops from Afghanistan; I have participated in two European summits, so I have fully respected the engagements I made to the French.

This is part of the president's problem. Where's Barack Obama been when the crime rate and the murder rate in Chicago has gone up in 18 percent? Where has he been when the murder rate in New York is up 11 percent? Instead he and liberals like Bill de Blasio and Rahm Emanuel and others, what they're doing is not supporting the police departments, not making sure that they're being supported, and they're letting them do their jobs. And so we have criminals who have easy access to guns.

We saw a hole in the Chicago poetry scene that slam couldn't fill. I think a lot more can be done with the form than just competition.

I think I'm pretty smart on what I spend my money on. I still don't have a new car, I drive my old car that I've had forever. But I bought a house in downtown Chicago.

I'm only involved really right now with the Art Ensemble of Chicago and the Brass Fantasy.

The niceties of existence were not a matter of concern, yet everything around was closed down most of the time. If you lived in a middle-class community in Chicago, children and adults came daily to the door saying, 'We are starving, how about a potato?' I speak from poignant memory.

An amusing city, Chicago, any way you look at it. I'm afraid we are in for the time of our lives.

I began filmmaking in high school, at the Chicago Academy for the Arts. My first documentary was about a dysfunctional obese middle-aged carpet cleaner named Bill, who lived with his Mom, and his love affair with Anna, a drug-addicted prostitute. I made that when I was 16.

The greatest moment of my life was, somebody sent me a cable-access show from Chicago that had Joey Ramone on it showing the video we made together. And he was talking about, like, "This guy Dan Clowes postponed his wedding for us. He's a great guy."

I grew up on the south side of Chicago in a working class community. There were no miracles in my life, there's nothing miraculous about how I grew up, and I want people to know when they look at me, to be clear that they see what an investment in public education can look like.

Was there ever a name more full of purpose than Chicago's? ... spoken as Chicagoans themselves speak it, with a bit of a spit to give heft to its slither, it is gloriously onomatopoetic.

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.

My success was the shock of recognition, probably, rather than the quality of the work. I mean, the quality may have been fine, but there's a lot of fine work out there. It was the fact that I was doing something that at that time, nobody else was doing, except for say, Mort Saul out in San Francisco on The Hungry Eye, and "Second City" was emerging out in Chicago. Nothing in print. It was basically happening in cabaret and nothing in fiction. And certainly nothing in New York in cartoons.