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.

Writing allows me the time to travel and see the world which is what I always wanted to do. I'd really like to have been Sir Richard Francis Burton but it's the wrong century.

The stability and peace which seemed to be so firmly established by the brilliant monarchy of Francis I vanished with the terrible outbreak of the Wars of Religion.

My first holiday to San Francisco in 1998-99 was supposed to be a two-week vacation but I ended up staying five weeks and nearly didn't come home.

San Francisco businesses face many challenges including high rents regulatory burdens and the rising cost of workers compensation insurance and employee health plans.

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.

My family moved a lot as a kid. We started in Colorado where I lived for five years. We moved to Chicago for two years to San Francisco for one year Connecticut for seven Oregon for a couple years and then I went to school.

My family moved a lot as a kid. We started in Colorado where I lived for five years. We moved to Chicago for two years to San Francisco for one year Connecticut for seven Oregon for a couple years and then I went to school. So I was always moving I'm still always moving.

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.

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.

The cool parts - the parts that have won Dubai its reputation as 'the Vegas of the Middle East' or 'the Venice of the Middle East' or 'the Disney World of the Middle East if Disney World were the size of San Francisco and out in a desert' - have been built in the last ten years.

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.

I've been all over the world. I love New York I love Paris San Francisco so many places. But there's no place like New Orleans. It's got the best food. It's got the best music. It's got the best people. It's got the most fun stuff to do.

So we just kind of created our own thing and that's part of the beauty of Athens: is that it's so off the map and there's no way you could ever be the East Village or an L.A. scene or a San Francisco scene that it just became its own thing.

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

Damien Hirst is the Elvis of the English art world its ayatollah deliverer and big-thinking entrepreneurial potty-mouthed prophet and front man. Hirst synthesizes punk Pop Art Jeff Koons Marcel Duchamp Francis Bacon and Catholicism.