I happen to be fortunate: I live in San Francisco, and I can afford a $600 phone. Or two of them!
I have no memories of my childhood in Texas. When I was about four, we moved to San Francisco. I was in the middle of seven brothers and sisters: three girls and four boys. Most of my older brothers and sisters got the blame for everything, and the little ones had a free ride. We loved each other but fought like cats and dogs.
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.
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.
In San Francisco, I found Warren Levinson, who had set up a program to study Rous Sarcoma Virus, an archetype for what we now call retroviruses. At the time, the replication of retroviruses was one of the great puzzles of animal virology. Levinson, Levintow and I joined forces in the hope of solving that puzzle.
When the Chinese first came to San Francisco, they were actually welcomed by the mayor and they had special ceremonies for them-again this is when their colony was very small, only a few Chinese.
I know what it's like to be from an incredibly small town and the oppressiveness of it and the desire to get out. But I didn't realize that readers in Seattle, New York, and San Francisco might not get that so instinctively.
I almost threw up the first time I set foot inside the University of California, San Francisco's Comprehensive Care Center and joined the stream of thin, slow-moving, low-voiced, gray-skinned people. I didn't want to be one of the pitied, the struck-down.
We tend to prefer candidates that don't talk about us one way in Scranton and another way in San Francisco.
Monterey, I remember, but I seem to remember the Fillmore West, that we played the week before Monterey. That was much more memorable for me. The first time in San Francisco. They were good gigs.
When I was 13, I began relaxing my hair, and that meant when I turned 18 it began to crack and fall off, and when I began anchoring, I had short, stubbly pieces of hair. And trying to report in San Francisco with fog meant my hair swelled.
I messed around in high school, but I pretty much put it away until I did a television show in San Francisco.
When I went to get my master's in creative writing at San Francisco State after Grinnell, I joined the moribund remnants of the Actor's Workshop, until I saw Kay Hayward and Sandy Archer in the San Francisco Mime Troupe and drove down that day to audition. The rest is history.
I used to be a street singer in San Francisco.
On the personal side, family is really important to me. I have a big family - five kids and 12 grandkids - so keeping that going is wonderful. And I do a lot of philanthropy. I'm chairman of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
I love that there are beaches you can walk your dog on in San Francisco. Fort Funston is big and always packed with hundreds of dogs and their people. A great place to hike and get some exercise and fresh air with your well-mannered pup. Not recommended for antisocial dogs; there's just too much commotion there.
As a young surgeon in training at the University of California San Francisco General Hospital in the early '80s, my colleagues and I were inundated with an epidemic of young men with fevers, rashes, swollen lymph nodes and eventually death.
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.
I thought art was dead rabbits hanging by their feet on a wall. I went to Italy and saw all the religious paintings, and they didn't move me all that much. Then someone invited me to see this van Gogh exhibit at the Rosenberg Gallery in San Francisco.
In the wake of the San Francisco scene, ears were alive. It was a listening generation.
One winter, I went to Erfoud to research trilobites and got to know the quarries, the dealers, and the remote mining villages. They are not easy places to visit, and this was a completely unknown corner of the world economy: children slaving away on desert cliffs to furnish wealthy collectors in San Francisco.
Now Dave Eggers, if you lived in San Francisco, is not an easy person to be done with. Everyone - and by everyone, I mean every white person with a college education and an interest in books - wants a piece of him. It's not just his amazingly powerful prose; it's also his charitable works.
I'd always wanted to live in San Francisco, and my circumstances never permitted it. I'm so happy I made the move.
The best tattooists are in San Francisco, and they're kind of like my family now. I'm always excited to come back to San Francisco.
In college, I stopped doing pre-med and went into theater, and then I moved to San Francisco and lived there for five years.
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.
Their practice habits are terrific. I've been around some really good guys from different teams in terms of bringing it to practice. When I was in San Francisco, Bryant Young was that way. Every practice on it.
I wanted to be a classical actress. I plodded along. I went to junior college in San Francisco, I was in a Repertory Company. My hero was Eva Le Gallienne, who was a great theater actress at the turn of the century who created her own company, and she wrote these hilarious autobiographies at the time.
I've been around all kinds of people, defense attorneys, working with cops, working with politicians, both sides of the aisle, including Democrats as former first lady of San Francisco, and the Republicans, too, so I've had a front row seat to lots of things in life.
I think what you call 'metropolitan America' - as in San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles - I think there's more awareness of the atypical, while in more traditional Britain, there's the kitchen-sink dramas and thrillers. It's more formulaic.
It was in the open market that we found Joe DiMaggio with the San Francisco Seals. A bad knee had scared everybody else off DiMaggio. But we risked $25,000 in cash and five players, and landed a star whom I would not sell for $250,000.
I think Hitchcock had a thing about hills: think of the house on the hill in 'Psycho.' Then, in 'Vertigo,' Scottie is forever traversing the city, going downhill all the time as he goes deeper and deeper into himself. It's as if Hitchcock is using San Francisco as a psychological map.
Sometimes I wonder if I'm just memorializing my youth when I spent all this time outdoors. I always envisioned my adult life like I'm going to run every day and live in the woods in a cabin if I can - and here I am living in San Francisco and working in a studio.
Left the ranch in 1883, went to California, going through the States and territories, reached Ogden the latter part of 1883, and San Francisco in 1884.
My home is San Francisco - that is definitely what I consider my home.
I moved to San Francisco to work at Apple's Cupertino office in the summer of 2006, then stayed on remotely in a part-time job back in Austin. It was an internship with iTunes. I helped them launch new features as well as new marketing programs. I also helped program the iTunes Store every week, working on which artists and albums got featured.