Quotes About Buenos Aires

“Early this morning, 1 January 2021, three minutes after midnight, the last human being to be born on earth was killed in a pub brawl in a suburb of Buenos Aires, aged twenty-five years, two months and twelve days.”

— P.D. James

“Brazil was beastly but Buenos Aires the best. Not Tiffany's, but almost.”

— Truman Capote

“Already Buenos Aires was dyeing the horizon with pink fires, soon to flaunt its diadem of jewels, like some fairy hoard.”

— Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

“If you go to Singapore or Amsterdam or Seoul or Buenos Aires or Islamabad or Johannesburg or Tampa or Istanbul or Kyoto, you'll find that the people differ wildly in the way they dress, in their marriage customs, in the holidays they observe, in their religious rituals, and so on, but they all expect the food to be under lock and key. It's all owned, and if you want some, you'll have to buy it.”

— Daniel Quinn

“Perhaps one should expect to be attended to by philosophers in Edinburgh delicatessens, just as one might be waited upon by psychoanalysts in the restaurants of Buenos Aires. Is the braised beef really what you want?”

— Alexander McCall Smith

“'Tiempos del Mundo' is insignificant as far as the newspaper market is concerned here in Buenos Aires.”

— Pepe Eliaschev

“Sunday is the day I connect with Buenos Aires. I speak to or text my mother every day, but on Sunday I phone everyone.”

— Elena Roger

“In Buenos Aires, I have a very close friend who speaks very good English, and she taught me. It was quite difficult because the muscles of your mouth are used to your language, and then when you want to speak another language, they don't go to the place they need to go to make the sound.”

— Elena Roger

“Sometimes Buenos Aires is not so safe. You are scared to have someone behind you at night.”

— Elena Roger

“I had a library of maybe 1,000 books in my room in Buenos Aires. I did have the sense that everything there was organised in the right way. You'll probably think I needed serious psychiatric treatment, but there were times when I would not buy a book because I knew it wouldn't fit one of the categories into which I had divided the library.”

— Alberto Manguel

“Buenos Aires is less than an hour's drive from the ranch, and in the evening, we might meet friends for dinner there. I get recognised a bit, but I'm lucky that polo isn't as popular as other sports.”

— Facundo Pieres

“I always have my journal with me. It was handmade by a guy at the San Telmo market in Buenos Aires. If you go there he can make you one. It's leather and bronze and I'm able to replace the paper when it runs out. It has a lion on the cover that I say is there to protect my thoughts.”

— Blake Mycoskie

“Buenos Aires is easily one of the most stylish cities in the world with its eclectic collection of neighborhoods, each with its own unique charm.”

— Ben Elliot

“My memory carries me back to a certain evening
some sixty years ago, to my father's library in Buenos
Aires. I see him; I see the gaslight; I could place my
hand on the shelves. I know exactly where to find
Burton's Arabian Nights and Prescott's Conquest of
Peru, though the library exists no longer.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

“The history of Buenos Aires is written in its telephone directory. Pompey Romanov, Emilio Rommel, Crespina D. Z. de Rose, Ladislao Radziwil, and Elizabeta Marta Callman de Rothschild - five names taken at random from among the R's - told a story of exile, desolation, disillusion, and anxiety behind lace curtains.”

— Bruce Chatwin

“Argentina's like a novel, he said, a lie, or make-believe at best. Buenos Aires is full of crooks and loudmouths, a hellish place, with nothing to recommend it except the women, and some of the writers, but only a few. Ah, but the pampas-the pampas are eternal. A limitless cemetery, that's what they're like.”

— Roberto Bolaño

“On July 18, we will mark the 12th anniversary of the senseless loss of 85 lives in the bombing of the Jewish Cultural Center in Buenos Aires, Argentina.”

— Tom Lantos

“He has spent weeks on the pristine, frosty shore of Lake Baikal in Siberia. He has drunk himself stupid in the fairy-tale blood brothels of old Dubrovnik, lounged in red-smoke dens in Laos, enjoyed the New York blackout of 1977, and more recently, feasted on Vegas showgirls in the Dean Martin suite at the Bellagio. He has watched Hindu abstainers wash away their sins in the Ganges, danced a midnight tango on a boulevard in Buenos Aires, and bitten into a faux geisha under the shade of a shogun pavilion in Kyoto.”

— Matt Haig

“The two cities I've found very hard to leave in my life were New York and Buenos Aires.”

— J. J. Field

“The first time I played was in Buenos Aires - was in 1983. The dictatorship was in position.”

— Ruben Blades

“The whole world feels that it knows Francis, not so much because he follows Francis of Assisi but because he is always himself. We have seen him pay his own hotel bill and heard that Francis called Buenos Aires for a pair of ordinary black shoes, like John XXIII, who preferred stout peasant shoes to the traditional papal footwear.”

— Eugene Kennedy

“Charismatics have seen pictures of Pope Francis when he was Archbishop of Buenos Aires praying and asking Protestant pastors to pray for him. His friendship towards the charismatic renewal is there.”

— Ralph Martin

“In a plane again, Ashley thought sourly, her nose pressed to the window. Down below, glacier fought granite from horizon to horizon. This was the final leg of the two-day journey. Yesterday, they had flown the eight hundred miles from Buenos Aires to Esperanza, the Argentine army base on the tip on an Antarctic Peninsula. There, Ashley had her first taste of Antarctic air - like ice water poured into her lungs.”

— James Rollins

“I learned an invaluable lesson from a kid in Argentina when we were playing Buenos Aires in 2002. I came out of the hotel and this 16-year-old-boy asked me to sign his copy of my Six Wives of Henry VIII album. As I was signing it I asked him 'what does a 16 year-old like about this old music?' and he looked at me, quite hurt, and said, 'it might be old to you, Mr Wakeman, but I only heard it for the first time last week. When you hear something for the first time, it's new.' I've never forgotten that.”

— Rick Wakeman

“I sustained an injury by singing with the flu during the second performance of Andrea Chenier in Buenos Aires. I was very sick, with chills and sweats, but against my better judgement I let them talk me into singing. Of course I gave the performance everything I had and my voice was hurt. It was scary at first, but fortunately there was no permanent damage. I just had to be patient and wait for the voice to return. It took six weeks of physical recuperation and it took time to recover my confidence as well.”

— Ben Heppner

“Buenos Aires is my favorite city. I think it's fantastic - but is a troubled, sort of psychologically troubled city.”

— John Gimlette

“News at Work is a vivid, inside look at the collision of print journalism and electronic media. Based on close access to the leading news organizations in Buenos Aires, Boczkowski documents how contemporary journalism is caught in the grip of emulation; this spiral of imitation exacerbated further by global news media and their intensifying homogenization. The portrait of this transformation of the news is both fascinating and deeply worrying, and is guaranteed to provoke debate.”

— Walter W. Powell

“In my second year of Harvard Divinity School, where I was studying to be a minister like my father, I met a guy named Robert Cox, who had been the editor of the Buenos Aires Herald during the Dirty War in Argentina. Bob used to print the names of those who had been disappeared the day before, above the fold in his newspaper. It was a kind of an awakening to me to see what great journalism can and should do.”

— Chris Hedges