Life's Pleasures Quote by Herb Caen

Herb Caen’s line works because it flatters and skewers in the same breath, turning the glittering nightlife class into something suspiciously biological. Pairing “cockroaches and socialites” is a classic Caen move: an urban diarist’s wisecrack that sounds tossed off, but lands like a tiny indictment. Cockroaches are the city’s ultimate survivors, thriving in the cracks, unkillable, indiscriminate. Socialites, in his framing, are their upscale mirror image: equally nocturnal, equally adaptable, equally willing to consume whatever is put in front of them. The joke isn’t just that they both eat leftovers at 2 a.m. It’s that status culture can look a lot like scavenging when you strip away the velvet rope.

The specific intent is social satire without sermonizing. Caen isn’t writing a manifesto about inequality; he’s puncturing the pretensions of high society with a metaphor that’s impossible to unsee. “Stay up all night” evokes not creativity or passion, but a kind of performative endurance: the party as a stamina contest. “Eat anything” is the sharper blade, suggesting appetites that aren’t refined so much as opportunistic - social, sexual, culinary, reputational.

Context matters: mid-century San Francisco, where Caen chronicled a city in love with its own scene-making. The line reads like a dispatch from a place where nightlife is civic identity, and where the people who “matter” often prove they matter by being seen everywhere, consuming everything, and never quite going home.