Sunday, April 23, 2017 – Out Here
I could hear everything, together with the hum of my hotel neon. I never felt sadder in my life. LA is the loneliest and most brutal of American cities; New York gets godawful cold in the winter but there’s a feeling of wacky comradeship somewhere in some streets. LA is a jungle. ~ Jack Kerouac, On the Road
Los Angeles is like a beauty parlor at the end of the universe. ~ Emily Mortimer
Los Angeles is a large city-like area surrounding the Beverly Hills Hotel. ~ Fran Lebowitz
Los Angeles is just New York lying down. ~ Quentin Crisp
Tip the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright
Los Angeles gives one the feeling of the future more strongly than any city I know of. A bad future, too, like something out of Fritz Lang’s feeble imagination. ~ Henry Miller
Los Angeles was the kind of place where everybody was from somewhere else and nobody really dropped anchor. It was a transient place. People drawn by the dream, people running from the nightmare. Twelve million people and all of them ready to make a break for it if necessary. Figuratively, literally, metaphorically – any way you want to look at it – everybody in L.A. keeps a bag packed. Just in case. ~ Michael Connelly
The old folk from Indiana and Iowa and Illinois, from Boston and Kansas City and Des Moines, they sold their homes and their stores, and they came here by train and by automobile to the land of sunshine, to die in the sun, with just enough money to live until the sun killed them, tore themselves out by the roots in their last days, deserted the smug prosperity of Kansas City and Chicago and Peoria to find a place in the sun. And when they got here they found that other and greater thieves had already taken possession, that even the sun belonged to the others; Smith and Jones and Parker, druggist, banker, baker, dust of Chicago and Cincinnati and Cleveland on their shoes, doomed to die in the sun, a few dollars in the bank, enough to subscribe to the Los Angeles Times, enough to keep alive the illusion that this was paradise, that their little papier-mâché homes were castles. ~ John Fante, Ask the Dust
There are times when Los Angeles is the most magical city on Earth. When the Santa Ana winds sweep through and the air is warm and so, so clear. When the jacaranda trees bloom in the most brilliant lilac violet. When the ocean sparkles on a warm February day and you’re pushing fine grains of sand through your bare toes while the rest of the country is hunkered down under blankets slurping soup. But other times, like when the jacaranda trees drop their blossoms in an eerie purple rain, Los Angeles feels like only a half-formed dream. Like perhaps the city was founded as a strip mall in the early 1970s and has no real reason to exist. An afterthought from the designer of some other, better city. A playground made only for attractive people to eat expensive salads. ~ Steven Rowley
A good part of any day in Los Angeles is spent driving, alone, through streets devoid of meaning to the driver, which is one reason the place exhilarates some people, and floods others with an amorphous unease. ~ Joan Didion
Like earlier generations of English intellectuals who taught themselves Italian in order to read Dante in the original, I learned to drive in order to read Los Angeles in the original. ~ Reyner Banham
There are two modes of transport in Los Angeles: car and ambulance. Visitors who wish to remain inconspicuous are advised to choose the latter. ~ Fran Lebowitz
It is redundant to die in Los Angeles. ~ Truman Capote
Los Angeles remains the most photographed and least remembered city in the world. ~ Norman M. Klein
Hollywood is wonderful. Anyone who doesn’t like it is either crazy or sober. ~ Raymond Chandler
I love Los Angeles. I love Hollywood. They’re beautiful. Everybody’s plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic. ~ Andy Warhol
It’s a scientific fact. For every year a person lives in Hollywood, they lose two points of their IQ. ~ Truman Capote
Hollywood is a place where people from Iowa mistake each other for stars. ~ Fred Allen
I’ve been asked if I ever get the DT’s. I don’t know; it’s hard to tell where Hollywood ends and the DT’s begin. ~ W. C. Fields
Hollywood held this double lure for me, tremendous sums of money for work that required no more effort than a game of pinochle. ~ Ben Hecht
In Hollywood if a guy’s wife looks like a new woman, she probably is. ~ Dean Martin
A dreary industrial town controlled by hoodlums of enormous wealth, the ethical sense of a pack of jackals, and taste so degraded that it befouled everything it touched. ~ S. J. Perelman
Strip away the phony tinsel of Hollywood and you’ll find the real tinsel underneath. ~ Oscar Levant
Hollywood is where they shoot too many pictures and not enough actors. ~ Walter Winchell
Ever since they found out that Lassie was a boy, the public has believed the worst about Hollywood. ~ Groucho Marx
Hollywood is like being nowhere and talking to nobody about nothing. ~ Michelangelo Antonioni
In Hollywood the woods are full of people that learned to write but evidently can’t read; if they could read their stuff, they’d stop writing. ~ Will Rogers
It’s a great place to live, but I wouldn’t want to visit there. ~ Will Rogers
I just want to tell y’all not to worry – them people in New York and Hollywood are not going to change me none. ~ Elvis Presley
The violet hush of twilight was descending over Los Angeles as my hostess, Violet Hush, and I left its suburbs headed towards Hollywood. In the distance a glow of huge piles of burning motion-picture scripts lit up the sky. The crisp tang of frying writers and directors whetted my appetite. How good it was to be alive, I thought, inhaling deep lungfuls of carbon monoxide. ~ S. J. Perelman
There is a theory that almost anything that’s fun is going to be ruined sooner or later by people from California. They tend to bring seriousness to subjects that don’t deserve it, and they tend to get very good at things that weren’t very important in the first place. ~ Calvin Trillin
Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world. ~ Jean-Luc Godard
A story should have a beginning a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order. ~ Jean-Luc Godard
Give me a couple of years, and I’ll make that actress an overnight success. ~ Samuel Goldwyn
The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder. ~ Alfred Hitchcock
The movies are the only business where you can go out front and applaud yourself. ~ Will Rogers
It’s the movies that have really been running things in America ever since they were invented. They show you what to do, how to do it, when to do it, how to feel about it, and how to look how you feel about it. Everybody has their own America, and then they have the pieces of a fantasy America that they think is out there but they can’t see. ~ Andy Warhol
Shoot a few scenes out of focus. I want to win the foreign film award. ~ Billy Wilder
The average Hollywood film star’s ambition is to be admired by an American, courted by an Italian, married to an Englishman and have a French boyfriend. ~ Katharine Hepburn
The motion picture is like a picture of a lady in a half-piece bathing suit. If she wore a few more clothes, you might be intrigued. If she wore no clothes at all, you might be shocked. But the way it is, you are occupied with noticing that her knees are too bony and that her toenails are too large. The modern film tries too hard to be real. Its techniques of illusion are so perfect that it requires no contribution from the audience but a mouthful of popcorn. ~ Raymond Chandler
Emotionally involving the audience is easy. Anybody can do it blindfolded: get a little kitten and have some guy wring its neck. ~ George Lucas
If my books had been any worse, I should not have been invited to Hollywood, and if they had been any better, I should not have come. ~ Raymond Chandler
After two years in Washington, I often long for the realism and sincerity of Hollywood. ~ Fred Thompson, speech before the Commonwealth Club of California
You can’t find any true closeness in Hollywood, because everybody does the fake closeness so well. ~ Carrie Fisher
Hollywood is like Picasso’s bathroom. ~ Candice Bergen
Los Angeles makes the rest of California seem authentic. ~ Jonathan Culler
There is science, logic, reason; there is thought verified by experience. And then there is California. ~ Edward Abbey
Just Above Sunset 