In a new interview, novelist and chronicler of the San Francisco we all think was way cooler than it is now, Armistead Maupin, gives some choice quotes about how lame it is to always be looking backwards.

Maupin, as we reported earlier, decamped to Santa Fe from the Castro in 2012, and he now explains to the Chron that the decision was largely financial. "San Francisco was getting too pricey for us," he says, referring to himself and husband Chris Turner. "Riches and fame aren't the same thing. Writers have been enormously devalued." Ugh, right?

But he's pretty positive about the move and says he may want to look for a pied a terre back here in S.F. at some point.

The best part of the interview, though, comes in response to the question of how San Francisco has changed and whether it's lost some of its "quirkiness" over the decades. Maupin says:

There are wonderful things happening all over the city, and we don't intend to live apart from the city permanently...

I remember how I religiously read Herb Caen when I first moved to San Francisco, and read his column to find out how I should feel about the city. What I didn't like was when he went off on a bender about how he missed the old days, the '30s and '40s.

I vowed when I got older, I wouldn't look back at the city and say it was so much better [in the '70s]. Times change. New generations come along. It's easy to go on a diatribe against techies, but they want to find the cutest spot in the cutest city, too.

Maupin just published what will be the ninth and last book of the Tales of the City series, The Days of Anna Madrigal, in which a 92-year-old Anna makes a pilgrimage to Burning Man. He'll be signing books at Book Passage at the Ferry Building on Tuesday at 12:30 p.m.

[Chron]