Inez Haynes Irwin quotes:

Perhaps after all the most breathtaking quality about San Francisco is these unexpected glimpses that you are always getting of beautiful hill-heights and beautiful valley-depths. ... City lights, like nests of diamonds, glitter and glisten in the depths of those valleys.

I'd rather be in prison in California than free anywhere else.

A green Christmas makes a fat graveyard.

California ... produces the maximum of scenery and the minimum of weather ...

California, where the spring comes in the fall and the fall comes in the summer and the summer comes in the winter and the winter never comes at all ...

there are no old people in California. Nobody ever gets a chance to grow old there. The climate won't let you. The scenery won't let you. The life won't let you.

It is a racking thing to have a plague of ideas and no chance to get rid of them on paper. I've nearly gone mad at times.

Genius is a good deal like the sea ... Nothing can restrain its tide or quicken it.

whatever San Francisco is or is not, it is never dull. Life there is in a perpetual ferment. It is as though the city kettle had been set on the stove to boil half a century ago and had never been taken off. The steam is pouring out of the nose. The cover is dancing up and down. The very kettle is rocking and jumping. But by some miracle the destructive explosion never happens.

with a country of rare picturesqueness for a background, a people of rare beauty for actors, everybody more or less permeated with the artistic instinct and everybody more or less writing poetry - California has a pageant for breakfast, a fiesta for luncheon and a carnival for dinner. They are always electing queens. In fact any girl in California who hasn't been a queen of something before she's twenty-one is a poor prune.

there's no art but has some business to it and no business but some art.