New Orleans Quotes

Every time I close my eyes blowing that trumpet of mine, I look right into the heart of good old New Orleans. It has given me something to live for.

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.

Clean living keeps me in shape. Righteous thoughts are my secret. And New Orleans home cooking.

New Orleans cuisine is Creole rather than Cajun.

Even after the Super Bowl victory of the New Orleans Saints, I have noticed a large number of people implying, with bad jokes, that Cajuns aren't smart. I would like to state for the record that I disagree with that assessment. Anybody that would build a city 5 feet below sea level in a hurricane zone and fill it with Democrats who can't swim is a genius.

I think the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans was Hurricane Katrina.

An American has not seen the United States until he has seen Mardi-Gras in New Orleans.

Well, my dad was the district attorney of New Orleans for about 30 years.

Well I went to New Orleans to cover the jazz festival for Trio, it's this new arts channel, it's really great.

I always like to play very contemporary concepts of swing right next to New Orleans music because it highlights continuum.

I started this charity, Fashion for Relief, in 2005, after Hurricane Katrina happened. New Orleans was actually the first place I visited in the United States. It was one of my first big jobs, a shoot for British Elle. It was April 14, 1986.

Don't you just love these long rainy afternoons in New Orleans when an hour isn't just an hour — but a little bit of eternity dropped in your hands — and who knows what to do with it?

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

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.

And I wound up in New Orleans for all those years and it was a great place, really a catalyst creatively.

The biggest challenge in New Orleans has been to find workers who can climb a ladder after lunch.

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 AM on a Thursday night in late August in Shaker Heights, and I bet that you won't be able to say because nobody stays up that late. But in New Orleans, I'll tell you, it's like ink and honey passed through silver moonlight.

New Orleans food is as delicious as the less criminal forms of sin.

There's certain things in life that I love. One is architecture. And music, culture, food, people. New Orleans has all of that.

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.

Four months after we finished shooting, I'd been in New Orleans shooting another movie and my agent and I were having a bite to eat - actually in London - and he's sitting there and goes, 'Wow, I just can't believe how ripped you are.'

If I could put my finger on it, I'd bottle it and sell it. I came down here originally in 1972 with some drunken fraternity guys and had never seen anything like it - the climate, the smells. It's the cradle of music; it just flipped me. Someone suggested that there's an incomplete part of our chromosomes that gets repaired or found when we hit New Orleans. Some of us just belong here.

America has only three cities: New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans. Everywhere else is Cleveland.

You get a taste here in New Orleans that you don't get anywhere else in the country.

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.

It is evidently known, beyond contradiction, that New Orleans is the cradle of Jazz and I, myself, happened to be the creator in the year 1902.

I love New Orleans I love the way it looks. I love the way it feels.

You wanna do some livin' before you die. Do it down in New Orleans.

I have been robbed of three million dollars all told. Everyone today is playing my stuff and I don't even get credit. Kansas City style, Chicago style, New Orleans style hell, they're all Jelly Roll style.

What's New Orleans without music? And what's music without dancing?

The longer you live in New Orleans, the more unfit you become to live anywhere else.

New Orleans is 5 feet below sea level, which means that holes dug in the ground immediately fill with water. Coffins were punctured and sunk with weights, which didn't stop them from floating up out of the cemeteries and down the streets of the French Quarter on stormy nights. The solution was to bury people above ground, in what are called vaults.

New Orleans is my essence, my soul, my muse...

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.

The only excursion of my life outside of New Orleans took me through the vortex to the whirlpool of despair: Baton Rouge. . . . New Orleans is, on the other hand, a comfortable metropolis which has a certain apathy and stagnation which I find inoffensive.

It has been said that a Scotchman has not seen the world until he has seen Edinburgh; and I think that I may say that an American has not seen the United States until he has seen Mardi Gras in New Orleans.

we dance even if there's no radio. we drink at funerals. we talk too much & laugh too loud & live too large, and, frankly, we're suspicious of others who don't.

Ozzy Osbourne and Motley Crue in New Orleans on Mardi Gras = bad idea!

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.

Madame Lily Devalier always asked "Where are you?" in a way that insinuated that there were only two places on earth one could be: New Orleans and somewhere ridiculous.

There's a great deal of disturbance in this country and how black feel about what happened in Katrina, and, you know, many of the comics, many of performers are in Las Vegas and New Orleans trying to raise money for what happened there

My dad was the district attorney of New Orleans for about 30 years. And when he opened his campaign headquarters back in the early '70s, when I was 5 years old, my mother wanted me to play the national anthem. And they got an upright piano on the back of a flatbed truck and I played it.

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.

You don't see the European classical musicians allowing the music of Bach, Brahms, or Beethoven to become extinct. That music has gone on for centuries and centuries. We have the same obligation. Why do we have to become so 'hip' that we can say, 'Bebop is square,' or "New Orleans is square'? This, to me, is a shame.

I've known rivers: I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers. I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young. I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep. I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it. I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset. I've known rivers: Ancient, dusky rivers. My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

New Orleans is like the bad-kid island in 'Pinocchio.'

And you find as a writer there are certain spots on the planet where you write better than others, and I believe in that. And New Orleans is one of them.

The most interesting place I've gone on location was New Orleans

Although I miss my family and friends when I'm away from Amsterdam, I've never had that feeling of missing a city like I have with New Orleans. Especially for the music.

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.