Coffee Houses Quotes

Hackerspaces are the digital-age equivalent of English Enlightenment coffee houses. They are places open to all, indifferent to social status, and where ideas and knowledge hold primary value.

For those two years in college I was constantly singing and writing and playing in coffee houses and stuff.

Vienna is a handsome, lively city, and pleases me exceedingly.

I sang in the coffee houses . . . in the early 60's with no idea of success in terms of records or television. I just thought I was a storyteller. I had this deep, bassy voice. But I had incredible passion for the music I was singing.

When I was 6 years old, I was in a rock band that was horrible called 'Dead End.' The name kind of described us. People liked us; we would go and perform at coffee houses and stuff.

I sang in the coffee houses of the country in the early '60s with no idea of success in terms of records or television. I just thought I was a storyteller. I didn't even think of myself as a singer.

After college, rather than pursue real work, I joined a folk group and sang in coffee houses and nightclubs, an occupation that does little for the intellect and even less for the complexion.

Everything I loved had been dead for two centuries - or, as in the case of Graeco-Roman classicism, for two milenniums. I am never a part of anything around me - in everything I am an outsider. Should I find it possible to crawl backward through the Halls of Time to that age which is nearest my own fancy, I should doubtless be bawled out of the coffee-houses for heresy in religion, or else lampooned by John Dennis till I found refuge in the deep, silent Thames, that covers many another unfortunate.

I started writing songs in high school. And eventually, I got some songs recorded by some major artists, mostly because I was out there performing, and I was working in coffee houses and lounges, and people came to see me and hear my material.

What happened was, I always wanted to be a singer/songwriter kind of guy like a James Taylor or Crosby, Stills and Nash type of thing; I went to a lot of coffee houses and used to watch all those guys, but I never had the nerve to get up and do it because singing seems so personal and intimate to me. It was too revealing.

Our printing press is the Internet. Our coffee houses are social networks.

There's different kinds of improv. There's Second City improv where you try to slowly build a nice sketch. There's stuff you do in college coffee houses where you just go joke, joke, joke. Bring another funny character with a funny hat on his head. Christopher Guest is more the line of trying to get a story out.

I did the coffee house thing - we have coffee houses where people play, or we used to - and when I was 14, I started there. Just played all the time. Every weekend I had a show, or every Thursday. Open-mic nights, the whole thing.

The Potemkin city of which I wish to speak here is none other than our dear Vienna herself.