"New Orleans life is such a night life. The thing that comes up very often is that our day essentially doesn't start until midnight or 2 in the morning"
About this Quote
New Orleans gets framed as a mood, but Asprin nails it as a schedule: a city where the clock is less a rulebook than a dare. The line works because it treats “night life” not as entertainment but as infrastructure. Midnight isn’t the afterparty; it’s the soft opening of the real day. That inversion flatters the city’s mythology while also smuggling in something sharper: if your day “doesn’t start” until 2 a.m., you’re living in a place that has opted out of the mainstream American bargain of productivity, early mornings, and respectable rhythms.
Asprin’s phrasing is casual, almost tossed off, which is precisely the point. He’s describing a cultural norm without moralizing it. The subtext is permission: in New Orleans, you’re allowed to be out of step, to make social life the organizing principle. It also hints at the city’s porous boundaries between work and play - bartenders, musicians, service workers, and revelers sharing the same hours, the same streets, the same economy of late-night movement.
Context matters: Asprin isn’t a civic booster or a politician selling tourism; he’s a genre novelist with a feel for lived texture and world-building. He’s effectively describing a setting rule. New Orleans becomes a kind of alternate reality inside the United States, not because it’s exotic, but because it runs on a different operating system - one where the most human hours are the ones most cities try to sleep through.
Asprin’s phrasing is casual, almost tossed off, which is precisely the point. He’s describing a cultural norm without moralizing it. The subtext is permission: in New Orleans, you’re allowed to be out of step, to make social life the organizing principle. It also hints at the city’s porous boundaries between work and play - bartenders, musicians, service workers, and revelers sharing the same hours, the same streets, the same economy of late-night movement.
Context matters: Asprin isn’t a civic booster or a politician selling tourism; he’s a genre novelist with a feel for lived texture and world-building. He’s effectively describing a setting rule. New Orleans becomes a kind of alternate reality inside the United States, not because it’s exotic, but because it runs on a different operating system - one where the most human hours are the ones most cities try to sleep through.
Quote Details
| Topic | Life |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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