New Orleans famous quotes
04-17-2025
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Any city may have one period of magnificence, like Boston or New Orleans or San Francisco, but it takes a real one to keep renewing itself until the past is perennially forgotten.
-- A. J. Liebling -
Bureaucracy has committed murder here in the greater New Orleans area, and bureaucracy has to stand trial before Congress now.
-- Aaron Broussard -
Bureaucracy has murdered people in the greater New Orleans area. And bureaucracy needs to stand trial before Congress today. So I'm asking Congress, please investigate this now. Take whatever idiot they have at the top of whatever agency and give me a better idiot. Give me a caring idiot. Give me a sensitive idiot. Just don't give me the same idiot.
-- Aaron Broussard -
I have held the following jobs: office temp, ticket seller in movie theatre, cook in restaurant, nanny, and phone installer at the Super Bowl in New Orleans.
-- Adriana Trigiani -
Watching the scenes out of New Orleans, if you turn down the sound it could be the Sudan or any Third World country. But it's not. it's the United States of America.
-- Al Roker -
My music is homegrown from the garden of New Orleans. Music is everything to me short of breathing. Music also has a role to lift you up - not to be escapist but to take you out of misery.
-- Allen Toussaint -
To get to New Orleans you don't pass through anywhere else. That geographical location, being aloof, lets it hold onto the ritual of its own pace more than other places that have to keep up with the progress.
-- Allen Toussaint -
I don't feel at home in New Orleans. I don't feel at home in Austin or L.A. And I just felt immediately at home in northern Australia.
-- Amanda Palmer -
And we were Banksy on an overpass in New Orleans spray-painting porch lights on the hurricane. We were welcome mats for the un-forgiven. We never sold our windpipes to make a living. We were the letters sent to the wrong address, but opened anyway. We opened anyway.
-- Andrea Gibson -
There is a velvety sensuality here at the mouth of the Mississippi that you won't find anywhere else. Tell me what the air feels like at 3 A.M. on a Thursday night in August in Shaker Heights and I bet you won't be able to say because nobody stays up that late. But in New Orleans, I tell you, it's ink and honey passed through silver moonlight.
-- Andrei Codrescu -
How did you fall in love with New Orleans? At once, madly. Looking back, sometimes I think it was predestined.
-- Andrei Codrescu -
My last trip to New Orleans was for the fifth anniversary of Katrina, and I had the awesome opportunity to bring my family down. We all worked on a house together and met some of the families.
-- AnnaLynne McCord -
I was the vampire Lestat again. I was back in action. New Orleans was once again my hunting ground.
-- Anne Rice -
In America, there might be better gastronomic destinations than New Orleans, but there is no place more uniquely wonderful. ... With the best restaurants in New York, you'll find something similar to it in Paris or Copenhagen or Chicago. But there is no place like New Orleans. So it's a must-see city because there's no explaining it, no describing it. You can't compare it to anything. So, far and away New Orleans.
-- Anthony Bourdain -
There is no other place on earth even remotely like New Orleans. Don't even try to compare it to anywhere else.
-- Anthony Bourdain -
In America, there might be better gastronomic destinations than New Orleans, but there is no place more uniquely wonderful.
-- Anthony Bourdain -
There was this rapper from New Orleans, Mystikal, who when I hear his music, I hear myself. Whenever I wanna get hyped, I put on Mystikal.
-- Anthony Mackie -
In New Orleans, where I'm from, the average household income, with two working parents, two kids, a dog and a little fence is $16,000 a year, so $15,000 for a movie sounds pretty good.
-- Anthony Mackie -
The Saints are doing a good job adjusting. I think their focus is on trying to make the best of their season, but also to try and help the people of New Orleans in the process. From everything I've seen and heard they are doing a good job of it.
-- Archie Manning -
New Orleans is just a doggone fun place to be.
-- Archie Manning -
I think the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans was Hurricane Katrina,
-- Arne Duncan -
My dad loved black singers. So listening to New Orleans music, eventually I wanted to play an instrument.
-- Bill Kreutzmann -
It is a cultural tradition that makes New Orleans what it is. It also represents the roots of American music and an important part of the African-American community in New Orleans. It unites people in some of the poorer neighborhoods of the city. It is absolutely critical to continue.
-- Bill Taylor -
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.
-- Billie Holiday -
There's a lot of UFO sightings in New Orleans, which isn't really too surprising. There's a lotta crazy people there. The people there lack the intelligence to know what they are seeing, so that's why the UFO's go there.
-- Billy Corgan -
And if citizens of New Orleans who are really contemplating coming back heard that we're really intent upon making the place secure again - regardless of whether the levees held or not - then I think a rebuilding process would really take shape.
-- Billy Tauzin -
New Orleans has to learn to live with water rather than in fear of water, and we need a master plan that shows us how to do this. It's so critical that we send a signal to everyone in the country that we're serious about rebuilding New Orleans.
-- Billy Tauzin -
The immediate, highest priority need, in my humble opinion, is that we build quickly the interim structures that can channel water away from population and businesses in the New Orleans area.
-- Billy Tauzin -
Venice, Italy, survives 365 days out of every year in water; New Orleans can survive a few days of water if it has to.
-- Billy Tauzin -
Invite the best and brightest to compete for a grand prize to come up with designs, including new zoning, building codes and so forth, for New Orleans that could make it safe from water, and let the state and city pick the plan that works best for Louisiana.
-- Billy Tauzin -
There are a lot of places I like, but I like New Orleans better.
-- Bob Dylan -
There is a house in New Orleans they call the Rising Sun, and it's been the ruin of many a poor boy and God I know I'm one.
-- Bob Dylan -
There are only two things: love, all sorts of love, with pretty girls, and the music of New Orleans or Duke Ellington. Everything else ought to go, because everything else is ugly.
-- Boris Vian -
Coltrane came to New Orleans one day and he was talking about the jazz scene. And Coltrane mentions that the problem with jazz was that there were too few groups.
-- Branford Marsalis -
I did grow up in New Orleans. I grew up right on the lake, right across the levee.
-- Bryan Batt -
In the dining room, next to my collection of colorful papier-mache Mardi Gras float art, hang draperies made of the New Orleans toile fabric that I designed pre-Katrina for Hazelnut.
-- Bryan Batt -
The people who couldn't get out of New Orleans to escape the storm were predominantly Black.
-- Charles Rangel -
We owe it to the flood victims of New Orleans to give them truthful answers as to why this event took place and to assure our citizens that tragedies like this will never happen again.
-- Charles Rangel -
My wife is from Laurel, Mississippi, and she has a lot of relatives down in Louisiana, Baton Rouge, and Shreveport, Louisiana. We go down there a lot. We got married in New Orleans. She has a cousin who introduced me to swamp pop, which is sort of zydeco/Cajun music with a little uptempo pop swing. Now I'm a big zydeco fan, I'm a big swamp-music fan.
-- Charlie Day -
Being from North Carolina, it's kind of slow-paced. There's not too much going on there, whereas in New Orleans, there's always something going on. I just love all the people, going out to dinner and enjoying anything I want.
-- Chris Paul -
If there was no New Orleans, America would just be a bunch of free people dying of boredom." -Judy Deck in an e-mail sent to Chris Rose
-- Chris Rose -
To be engaged in some small way in the revival of one of the great cities of the world is to live a meaningful existence by default.
-- Chris Rose -
When I am introduced as someone from New Orleans, people sometimes say: "I'm so sorry." New Orleans. I'm so sorry. That's not the way it was before,not the way it's supposed to be. When people find out you're from New Orleans, they're supposed to tell you about how they got drunk there once, or fell in love there, or first heard the music there that changed their lives. At worst people would say: "I've always wanted to go there." But now, it's just: "I'm sorry." Man, that kills me. That just kills me.
-- Chris Rose -
...as bad as it is here, it's better than being somewhere else." -Chris Rose, regarding life in Post-Katrina New Orleans
-- Chris Rose -
A New Orleans credo: When life gives you lemons--make daiquiris.
-- Chris Rose -
Everybody here has a story. New Orleans was always a place where people talked too much even if they had nothing to say. Now everyone's got something to say.
-- Chris Rose -
Then I guess we cannot miss the famous festival in New Orleans," he found himself saying, just to take the shadows from her eyes. She was silent a moment, her fingers twisting in the blanket. "Do you mean it, Gregori? We can go?" "You know how much I love crowds of humans," he said, straight-faced. She laughed at him. "They don't bite." "I do," he said, the words low and soft, his silver gaze at once possessive.
-- Christine Feehan -
Because I had worked the river boats some summers, pushing as far as New Orleans, I joined the Merchant Marine.
-- Clint Walker -
As a youngster I worked the river boats going down the Mississippi and Illinois Rivers, pushing barges to Chicago, then all the way down to New Orleans.
-- Clint Walker -
New Orleans may well have been the most liberal Deep South city in 1954 because of its large Creole population, the influence of the French, and its cosmopolitan atmosphere.
-- Constance Baker Motley -
New Orleans is a city whose basic industry is the service industry. That's why it makes its money. That's - it brings people to the city. People come to the city and experience the wonders of this extraordinary city and everything else. The question is that, how do we create jobs which are the jobs that have pay, that - living wages?
-- Danny Glover -
It seemed [there are] musical nodes on the planet where cultures meet and mix, sometimes as a result of unfortunate circumstances, like slavery or something else, in places like New Orleans and Havana and Brazil. And those are places where the European culture and indigenous culture and African culture all met and lived together, and some new kind of culture and especially music came out of that.
-- David Byrne -
For a while I was living in New Orleans for like 4, 5 years. I had just come back to town.
-- Delta Burke -
And we live in a French Quarter a lot of the time, in New Orleans. And the camaraderie of everybody there. Everybody takes care of each other.
-- Delta Burke -
Plus they think the hurricane's going to hit (starts laughing) New Orleans about the time they start. The timing, at least it appears now, that it'll be there Monday. That just demonstrates God's on our side
-- Donald Fowler -
The Society of North American Magic Realists welcomes its newest, most dazzling member, Louis Maistros. His debut novel is a thing of wonder, unlike anything in our literature. It startles. It stuns. It stupefies. No novel since CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES has done such justice to New Orleans. If Franz Kafka had been able to write like Peter Straub, this might have been the result.
-- Donald Harington -
Where are you from, Mr. Pendergast? Can't quite place the accent.†“New Orleans.†“What a coincidence! I went there for Mardi Gras once." “How nice for you. I myself have never attended.†Ludwig paused, the smile frozen on his face, wondering how to steer the conversation onto a more pertinent topic.
-- Douglas Preston -
Corruption at every level, city, state, federal, all has helped in making New Orleans a disaster area, the most disappearing land mass on the planet Earth.
-- Dr. John -
You wanna do some livin' before you die. Do it down in New Orleans...
-- Dr. John -
In 1972, I recorded Gumbo, an album that was both a tribute to and my interpretation of the music I had grown up with in New Orleans in the 1940s and 1950s. I tried to keep a lot of the little changes that were characteristic of New Orleans, while working my own funknology on piano and guitar.
-- Dr. John -
You look at public education system, charter schools, infrastructure, in so many ways New Orleans has come back stronger.
-- Drew Brees -
The Madden NFL franchise holds a special place in popular culture and the cover is a coveted position for players all over the league. I'm honored to be the first cover athlete chosen by Madden NFL fans and it's a great way to cap off an amazing year for the Saints and the city of New Orleans.
-- Drew Brees -
I needed New Orleans so badly back in 2006, just somebody to believe in me, somebody to care about me
-- Drew Brees -
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.
-- Duke Ellington -
We have an excellent list of speakers, but the spark will be provided by the crowd to turn talk into action. The Iraq occupation and the government's bumbling effort in New Orleans, has people wanting to act.
-- Ed Garvey -
What's New Orleans without music? And what's music without dancing?
-- Ellen DeGeneres -
You know, for 300 years it's been kind of the same. There are restaurants in New Orleans that the menu hasn't changed in 125 years, so how is one going to change or evolve the food?
-- Emeril Lagasse -
We're setting up an urban farm for kids on more than 20 acres in New Orleans. We want to make this a world-class educational center for the community.
-- Emeril Lagasse -
My office in New York is overflowing with all kinds of cookbooks, and in New Orleans we have a huge culinary library. So yeah, I guess I'm a little bit obsessed.
-- Emeril Lagasse -
Well, it seems that one day Dylan was drivin' up to San Francisco from New Orleans or somewhere, when our record [House of the Rising Sun] came over his radio. When it was announced he said to Joan Baez -- who was with him at the time -- 'This'll be the first time I've heard this version', although it was number one in the States. So he listened to it, stopped the car, ran round the car five times, banged his head on the bumper and began leapin' about shouting 'It's great! It's great!'
-- Eric Burdon -
Clean living keeps me in shape. Righteous thoughts are my secret. And New Orleans home cooking.
-- Fats Domino -
Everybody started calling my music rock and roll, but it wasn't anything but the same rhythm and blues I'd been playing down in New Orleans.
-- Fats Domino -
No other city in the U.S. can divest the visitor of so much money with so little enthusiasm. In Dallas, they take away with gusto; in New Orleans, with a bow; in San Francisco, with a wink and a grin. In New York, you're lucky if you get a grunt.
-- Fletcher Knebel -
Fancy a novel about Chicago or Buffalo, let us say, or Nashville, Tennessee! There are just three big cities in the United States that are 'story cities'- New York, of course, New Orleans, and, best of the lot, San Francisco.
-- Frank Norris -
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.
-- Frank Yerby -
It was in the Theatre St. Philippe (they has laid a temporary floor over the parquette seats) in the city we now call New Orleans, in the month of September, and in the year 1803.
-- George Washington Cable -
An eighty-nine year old kid from Boston playing a blues in New Orleans takes a lot of chutzpah.
-- George Wein -
There's no way New Orleans will ever be the city it was. I think it will have half the population. They may create a sort of Disneyland at the French Quarter for tourists. The rest I don't know
-- Geraldo Rivera -
We wander through old streets, and pause before the age stricken houses; and, strange to say, the magic past lights them up.
-- Grace King -
I was just mind-blown to find that New Orleans is just so much more fun and interesting than I had ever thought.
-- Harold Perrineau -
Before I went to New Orleans, I was a little scared of New Orleans. I don't know why. I had only been there a few times. Something about it made me feel nervous, knowing a bit about the history.
-- Harold Perrineau -
The biggest challenge in New Orleans has been to find workers who can climb a ladder after lunch.
-- Harry Anderson -
New Orleans is my essence, my soul, my muse...
-- Harry Connick, Jr. -
I live in Connecticut, but eventually I'd like to move back to New Orleans. I grew up there; the pace is a bit slower. Plus, I love crawfish and po'boys.
-- Harry Connick, Jr. -
New Orleans is my essence, my soul, my muse, and I can only dream that one day she will recapture her glory. I will do everything within my power to make that happen and to help in any way I can to ease the suffering of my city, my people!
-- Harry Connick, Jr. -
We have been working with Habitat for Humanity and we have built eighty homes, 80% of which are being lived in by New Orleans' musicians. It is called the Musicians' Village and at the center is the Ellis Marsalis Center for Music.
-- Harry Connick, Jr. -
Well, my dad was the district attorney of New Orleans for about 30 years.
-- Harry Connick, Jr. -
I'm sure that there are reasonable people that had some reasonable projections about the future of New Orleans, but none of those could include not trying to rebuild the city and make it better than it was before.
-- Harry Connick, Jr. -
I have no doubt that the government of this great nation will work with its people to lead New Orleans and the Gulf Coast back to an enlightened, proud, safe part of the world.
-- Harry Connick, Jr. -
It's a wonderful city and every American has enjoyed New Orleans in one way or the other.
-- Henry Bonilla -
I cannot believe that the killing of 2,000 Englishmen at New Orleans qualifies a person for the various difficult and complicated duties of the Presidency.
-- Henry Clay -
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.
-- Ian Somerhalder -
Neo-Hoodoo is the 8 basic dances of 19th century New Orleans' Place Congo- the Calinda the Bamboula the Chacta the Babouille the Conjaille the Juba the Congo and the VooDoo- modernized into the Philly Dog, the Hully Gully, the Funky Chicken, the Popcorn, the Boogaloo and the dance of great American choreographer Buddy Bradley.
-- Ishmael Reed -
Hurricane [Katrina] hit the Gulf Coast and destroyed much of the Gulf Coast - that was an act of God ... Now what happened to New Orleans, that was a complete failure of the federal government. Complete negligence by the feds.
-- James Carville -
You don't need a guidebook to see New Orleans - just a good pair of shoes.
-- James Carville -
I'd love to live in New Orleans. I love the freedom of it - for good and for bad.
-- James Gandolfini -
The truth of the matter is that for all the drive-in movie references, what Weston Ochse has really created in Multiplex Fandango is a travelogue. Acting as narrator and guide, Weston takes you on a trip to places familiar and obscure-New Orleans, the Sonoran desert, Mexico's Pacific coast, and the dark, impenetrable reaches of the soul. He shows off sights that chill the blood, and as with any good trip, the things seen and experienced along the way will stay with you for a lifetime.
-- Jeff Mariotte
