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.
When I was in the gunner's bubble of a B25 bomber, taking off from an aircraft carrier 100 miles off the coast of San Diego, I remember saying to myself how amazing it was to get the chance to do that.
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.
On another level, I want to mention that I have a strong Jewish identity and - over the years - have been involved in several Jewish projects, such as the establishment of a strong program of Judaic Studies at the University of California in San Diego.
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.
I was the first person in my family who was ever interested in dance, or fine art of any kind for that matter - I came from a very humble beginning in San Pedro, California.
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 had my heart set on becoming an English teacher, but stumbled into acting after meeting a theatrical agent in my dad's restaurant in San Diego.
If I was applying for a legal position, I would highlight my experience working for the San Francisco-L.A. DA's office, and I would mention some of the high-profile cases I did, but if I was looking for another television job, I would gloss over that, and I'd mention the highlight reel of what I did in television.
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.
People actually enjoy it when it rains in San Diego because we never get it. It's a nice change of pace. When you live in Southern California, everybody says, 'It's so expensive there.' I tell them, 'It's just a very expensive weather tax.'
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 grew up in San Diego, California, and I spent a lot of time in the summer basically living in a bathing suit, you know, get in the car and drive straight to the beach and spend the entire day in that thing, so I always approached bathing suits thinking that they are very much like outfits.
Sammy Sosa grew up without a father in the back of a converted public hospital in San Pedro de Macoris, a dusty seaside town in the Dominican Republic. His father, Juan Montero, died when Sosa was 5.
My brother brought home 'At San Quentin' when I was about 7, and we played it over and over again.
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.
The San Gabriel Mountains rise like a rampart at the edge of the city, safeguarding more than 500,000 acres of mature forests, mountain streams, dramatic waterfalls, and towering peaks that reach over 9,000 feet. These untamed places attract bighorn sheep, mountain lions, and other threatened or endangered species.
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 grew up in San Antonio, Texas, and went to a big high school called Douglas McArthur where there was a lot of track and a lot of football. It was a bit like 'Friday Night Lights.' I used to spend a lot of time at the track.
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.