New Orleans Quotes - Page 3

I've always been in love with that Delta-flavored music the music that came from Mississippi and Memphis and, especially, New Orleans. When I was 14, I was in a wanna-be New Orleans band in Toronto.

New Orleans. Born and raised. I lived there until I was 19.

I had a really good time in New Orleans, although I had some very tragic times in Baton Rouge. Some guys beat me up and threw my horn away. 'Cause I had a beard, then, and long hair like the Beatles.

In America, I would say New York and New Orleans are the two most interesting food towns. In New Orleans, they don't have a bad deli. There's no mediocrity accepted.

Rejoice at the death and cry at the birth: New Orleans sticks close to the Scriptures.

I'm from New Orleans. There's a lot of vampire mystique and mythology that resonates there, and I was fascinated by it. I always wanted to play one.

A New Orleans credo: When life gives you lemons--make daiquiris.

We wander through old streets, and pause before the age stricken houses; and, strange to say, the magic past lights them up.

I feel bad sometimes because I secretly hope New Orleans gets nailed again.

The feeling of New Orleans is so pervasive. It's such a strange and decadent and enchanted embrace that that city has. There's a dark magic present. It's no wonder that it's been the hot bed for so much vampiric folklore. The city has got an ancient quality. It's one of the oldest cities in North America.

I love New Orleans physically. I love the trees and the balmy air and the beautiful days. I have a beautiful house here.

Creole is New Orleans city food. Communities were created by the people who wanted to stay and not go back to Spain or France.

Many of the cemeteries are beautiful, and are kept in perfect order. When one goes from the levee or the business streets [of New Orleans] to it, to a cemetery, he observes to himself that if those people down there would live as neatly while they are alive as they do after they are dead, they would find many advantages in it; and besides, their quarter would be the wonder and admiration of the business world.

Times are not good here. The city is crumbling into ashes. It has been buried under taxes and frauds and maladministrations so that it has become a study for archaeologists...but it is better to live here in sackcloth and ashes than to own the whole state of Ohio.

The word [jazz] never lost its association with those New Orleans bordellos. In the 1920s I used to try to convince Fletcher Henderson that we ought to call what we were doing 'Negro music'. But it's too late for that now.

New Orleans is one of the two most ingrown, self-obsessed little cities in the United States. (The other is San Francisco.)

The sporting houses needed professors, and we had so many different styles that... it wouldn't make any difference that you just came from . . . whatever your tunes were over there, we played them in New Orleans.

Improvisation was the blood and bone of jazz, and in the classic, New Orleans jazz it was collective improvisation in which each performer, seemingly going his own melodic way, played in harmony, dissonance, or counterpoint with the improvisations of his colleagues. Quite unlike ragtime, which was written down in many cases by its composers and could be repeated note for note (if not expression for expression) by others, jazz was a performer's not a composer's art.

How did you fall in love with New Orleans? At once, madly. Looking back, sometimes I think it was predestined.

There's also the tradition of voodoo, the Haitian magic arts, in New Orleans. And because New Orleans is below sea level, when they bury people in New Orleans, it's mostly above ground. So you have this idea that the spirits are more accessible and can access you more easily because they're not even buried.

I think Northern California is the most beautiful place on earth. And I adore New Orleans, but there's something about the air in SF, for instance. It changes from moment to moment, like one's thoughts.

About fifteen miles above New Orleans the river goes very slowly. It has broadened out there until it is almost a sea and the water is yellow with the mud of half a continent. Where the sun strikes it, it is golden.

I'd advise you to visit New Orleans before you pass away. I really would. Because if you die without seeing New Orleans, you wasted half your life.

New Orleans is the only city in the world you go in to buy a pair of nylon stockings they want to know your head size.

There is no other place on earth even remotely like New Orleans. Don't even try to compare it to anywhere else.