Speakeasy Quotes

Everybody calls me a racketeer. I call myself a business man. When I sell liquor, it's bootlegging. When my patrons serve it on a silver tray on Lake Shore Drive [in Chicago] it's hospitality.

When I sell liquor, it's called bootlegging; when my patrons serve it on Lake Shore Drive, it's called hospitality.

They took a census of the floating unemployed on the East Side, which covered the homeless men. In the Municipal Lodging House, in the missions and shelters, in flop-houses and speakeasies where a man can stay all night, sleeping on sawdust, if he buys a drink… The regular salaried census takers had a force of between two and three hundred volunteers, divided up into teams…They are rounding up the misery of the East Side. …This is a queer census. It is a census of misery. It is the count of despair. In New York City for future reference they will tabulate the hopeless and put between covers of books how many men are wandering around shelterless, no prospect of jobs, no place to stay in the daytime, no place to sleep at night. How many are there - the wanderers from Municipal Lodging House to Salvation Army shelter, to flop-house, to speakeasy? How many are there sleeping in the subway or under the bridge at One Hundred and Eighty-fourth Street?

The first paid gig? It was back home in Terre Haute, Indiana, back in 1925, '26, when I was going to high school and working in a speakeasy.

My dad's uncles were illegal bookmakers who were known in the area as Peaky Blinders, that's the stories I heard.

Dancing in speakeasies was a job, and none of us knew for sure who were gangsters. No one told us, so how could we know? My mother used to come and take me home. We thought nothing of walking home together at two in the morning.

When Prohibition was introduced, I hoped that it would be widely supported by public opinion and the day would soon come when the evil effects of alcohol would be recognised. I have slowly and reluctantly come to believe that this has not been the result. Instead, drinking has generally increased; the speakeasy has replaced the saloon; a vast army of lawbreakers has appeared; many of our best citizens have openly ignored Prohibition; respect for the law has been greatly lessened; and crime has increased to a level never seen before.

I live in New York City, and one day many years ago I was with a poet, Gregory Corso, walking through Greenwich Village. He pointed to a doorway in an alley that he said led to a tunnel under Manhattan, a tunnel he'd use to run from the cops. I started learning about old Prohibition-era speakeasy tunnels under the city, for running whiskey.

There's nothing routine about 'Boardwalk Empire.' It's like being in some secret society where they call you up and tell you where to go: 'Meet us at the corner of such and so.'

Bootleggers quake in fear of me ringing them on a Sunday afternoon. I call after dinner, usually.

My favorite whisky bar in the world is in my adopted Bangkok. A refined and secretive Japanese speakeasy among the girly bars of Soi 33, it's called Hailiang.

I was playing birthday parties. House-rent parties where they used to sell whisky during prohibition.

I went to high school with Al Capone.

In December 2014, Uber held its annual holiday party on an unfurnished floor at its swank, mood-lit headquarters in San Francisco. Employees and investors attended in flamboyant attire from the Roaring '20s and drank at an open bar into the early morning hours.

'21' was the place, and you went down, and they opened the door. They had a little slit they'd look through, and then you'd murmur the password or whatever it was you had, showed a little ticket, and if they remembered who you were, you went in.

Terre Haute. They used to call it 'Terrible Hut' because it was so wide open. Gambling, red light district, speak-easies. I entertained for all the gangsters. Can't name a gangster that didn't come into the place where I worked.

I went to an audition for a Harry Belafonte Roaring Twenties special for choreographer Donald McKayle, but I failed.

Going out in Paris was like going out in the '30s dressed like the Andrews Sisters. It was everything I'd seen in books at my grandparents' house, only it was our generation.

A 1920s dress I wore on my 21st birthday... literally disintegrated on me. I had the most wild debauched night. And that disintegrated dress sits in my closet - such a great memory.

There are always decades that interest people. For me, that's the Roaring Twenties.

I used to love the '20s.

There is nothing in my life where I view myself as a 1920s person.

During Prohibition, Atlantic City created the idea of the speakeasy, which turned into nightclubs and that extraordinary political complexity and corruption coming out of New Jersey at the time. The long hand that they had-and maybe still do-even had to do with presidential elections.

If I could have lived as an actress in any period, it would have been the 1920s - I would have loved to have been part of that speakeasy era.

I am embarrassingly 1920s in style.