Los Angeles

"It's an abominable place. If there was an Old Testamental God, he would do his job and wipe the place out. The only bad thing is that some really good restaurants would go up as well."

"I like the Coen brothers. Their films are smart and disturbing. I am very impressed by what George Clooney is doing now. He is very political. I like the fact that he did Oceans Eleven and Oceans Twelve, made all that money and then leveraged the money and his success into interesting projects. Johnny Depp has also set up a production company and is showing an interest in risky projects that will not be easy. I am sorry that it is hard for the average person, and even for an above-average person, to see a film that is not a Hollywood production. You see those films only in the festivals. There are few people there. That is worrying. People don't think. My goal in work is to make them think. The media do the opposite."

"Movies in Hollywood now, for the past 20 or 30 years, are made mainly by lawyers or agents."

"In Hollywood, no one knows anything."

"I'm tired of being told how bad America is by leftwing millionaires like Michael Moore, George Soros and Hollywood entertainers who live in luxury because of the opportunities America offers. In thirty years, if they get their way, the United States will have the religious freedom and women’s rights of Saudi Arabia, the economy of Zimbabwe, the freedom of the press of China, the crime and violence of Mexico, the tolerance for Gay people of Iran, and the freedom of speech of Venezuela. Won’t multiculturalism be beautiful?"

"Consider California. Its wealth was initially built on gold mines. But today it is built on silicon and celluloid - Silicon Valley and the celluloid hills of Hollywood."

"My life is fair game for anybody. I spent an unhappy, penniless childhood in Brooklyn. I had to slug my way up in a town called Hollywood where people love to trample you to death. I don't relax because I don't know how. I don't want to know how. Life is too short to relax."

"Hollywood, an industry that shapes not only our national but global memories, has been the most reactionary cultural perpetrator of white nostalgia, stuck in a time loop and refusing to acknowledge that America's racial demographic has radically changed since 1965. Movies are cast as if the country were still "protected" by a white supremacist law that guarantees that the only Americans seen are carefully curated European descendants."

"[May 17, 1939] Next day, we took a taxi into Hollywood. I was amazed at the size of the city, and at its lack of shape. There seemed no reason why it should ever stop. Miles and miles of little houses, wooden or stucco, under a technicolor sky. Miles of little gardens, crowded with blossoms and flowering bushes; the architecture is dominated by the vegetation. A city without privacy, where neighbors share each other's lawns and look into each other's bedrooms. The whole place like a world's fair, quite new and already partly in ruins. The only permanent buildings are the schools and churches. On the hill, giant letters spell "Hollywoodland", but this is only another advertisement. It is silly to say that Hollywood, or any other city, is "unreal". But what the arriving traveler first sees are merely advertisements for a city which doesn’t exist."

"You know, let's put it this way, if all the people in Hollywood who have had plastic surgery, if they went on vacation, there wouldn't be a person left in town."

"Every country gets the circus it deserves. Spain gets bullfights. Italy the Church. America Hollywood."

"Let any pretty girl announce a divorce in Hollywood and the wolves come running. Fresh meat for the beast, and they are always hungry."

"To create what it does, Hollywood has to draw young people, often of unstable temperament, from all over the world. It plunges them into exacting work--surrounds them with a sensuous life-- and cuts them off from the normal sources of living."

"In Hollywood, brides keep the bouquets and throw away the groom."

"In Hollywood, the women are all peaches. It makes one long for an apple occasionally."

"By the beginning of 1968 most American cities were preparing for war—building up their arsenals, sending undercover agents into black neighborhoods like spies into enemy territory, recruiting citizenry as a standing reserve army. The city of Los Angeles, where thirty-four people had been killed in an August 1965 riot in the Watts section, was contemplating the purchase of bulletproof armored vehicles, each of which could be armed with a .30-caliber machine gun; a choice of smoke screen, tear gas, or fire-extinguishing launchers; and a siren so loud it was said to disable rioters. “When I look at this thing, I think, My God, I hope we’ll never have to use it,” said Los Angeles deputy police chief Daryl Gates, “but then I realize how valuable it would have been in Watts, where we had nothing to protect us from sniper fire when we tried to rescue our wounded officers.” Such talk had become good politics since California governor Pat Brown had been defeated the year before by Ronald Reagan, largely because of the Watts riots. The problem was that the vehicles cost $35,000 each. The Los Angeles Sheriff’s Office had a more cost-effective idea—a surplus army M-8 armored car for only $2,500."

"Tip the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles."

"We start from scratch, every generation. History does not bend inevitably toward justice, or freedom, or decency, or even stability. History doesn’t do that in Hong Kong, or in Moscow, or in Washington or New York City or Los Angeles. History goes where we push it. And if we don’t push, someone else will."

"For all its power and wealth and contrasting poverty and powerlessness, for all its size and complexity, Los Angeles is a strongly non-arrogant community, willing to shift and re-examine its problems, indeed its fundamental premises."

"I live in the Mexican part of L.A.; it's called L.A."

"If I had to make one comparison, I'd say that when it's five below in New York, it's 78 in Los Angeles, and when it's 110 in New York, it's 78 in Los Angeles; but there are 2,000,000 interesting people in New York–and only 78 in Los Angeles. There may be a hell of a lot more, but it's hard to find them."

"This time of year, the whole crazy city could go in one big fire storm. There were times that he almost wished that it would. He hated this smoggy, tawdry Babylon of a city, its endless tangle of freeways, the strange-looking houses, the filthy air, the thick, choking, glossy foliage everywhere, the drugs, the booze, the divorces, the laziness, the sleaziness, the porno shops and the naked encounter parlors and the massage joints, the weird people wearing their weird clothes and driving their weird cars and cutting their hair in weird ways. There was a cheapness, a trashiness, about everything here, he thought. Even the mansions and the fancy restaurants were that way: hollow, like slick movie sets. He sometimes felt that the trashiness bothered him more than the out-and-out evil. If you kept sight of your own values you could do battle with evil, but trashiness slipped up around you and infiltrated your soul without your even knowing it. He hoped that his sojourn in Los Angeles was not doing that to him."

"In L.A., we wear Chucks, not Ballies... Let me the serenade the streets of L.A."

"The entrance to the Underworld is in Los Angeles."

"We pushed the system to the extreme. We're fighting a wildfire with urban water systems"

"I am C-A. Sac-Town, Seaside, L.A.!"

"They call it the City of Angels. Funny. In my 30 years here, I haven't seen a single one. My old friend Henry Wilson used to say, people dare to dream here. He liked that about L.A. I'd say, bull, dreaming will get you killed. Maybe I was right."

"By 1902, it was evident that something had to be done. “The hobos are also killing that particular part of Los Angeles in which they have settled like a blight,” the LA Times reported. “The police would have an easier time down in the tenderloin if the city would put in a few more electric lights. There is seldom any cussedness going on where there is plenty of illumination. Los Angeles Street is as dark as a pocket.”"

"In 1876, Los Angeles became the end of the line of the transcontinental railroad. According to historian Glen Creason, the railroads were constructed east of LA’s historic core. That year, the main Southern Pacific Rail Yard and passenger terminus, known as River Station (now the site of the Los Angeles State Historic Park), opened. In 1888, it was joined by the Arcade Station at Fourth and Alameda. Thousands of men, many displaced veterans of the Civil War, began to “ride the rails,” stowing away in empty boxcars and jumping trains. Because of this, many cities saw a great increase in the number of transient visitors. They tended to congregate around or nearby the rail yards in cheap hotels, saloons, and brothels which sprung up to service them. In 1889, it was reported that 18 “tramps” had been arrested at the Southern Pacific Yard in one morning and would be forced to work on the chain gang, ironically building roads for the city. LA leaders knew what to blame for this “tramp harvest”—the increased mobility offered by the railroads."

"It was Christmastime in Los Angeles in 1902. The Los Angeles Times sent a reporter out to the saloon-lined intersection of First Street and Los Angeles Street, more commonly known to Times readers as the “Hobo Corner,” epicenter of Victorian LA’s Skid Row. “It was the toughest night of the year on the “Hobo Corner,’” the sensation-minded reporter wrote. “The tenderloin was literally swarming with tramps. Most of them were beastly drunk and the rest were sorry they weren’t. They were filthy dirty; some of them fairly squirmed with tenants—their steady company as it were.”"

"We’re facing a historic natural disaster. And I think that can't be stated strong enough"

"L.A. reminds me of that friend who just breaks into your house without knocking and eats all your food. You can't stop complaining about him when he's there, but when he leaves, you just wish he'd come by and bug you. L.A.'s got a heightened sense of color and joy, so much so that it becomes annoying. It makes me emotionally itchy."

"Then, she take it all in. Best kush filling my joints. Say, I sound too L.A.? That's the point!"

"Los Angeles is the home of self-expression, but the artists are middle-class and middling-minded; no passions will calcify here for years in the gloom to be revealed a decade later as the tessellations of hard and fertile work. ... In this land of the pretty-pretty, the virility is in the barbarisms, the vulgarities, it is in the huge billboards, the screamers of the neon lighting, the shouting farm-utensil colors of the gas stations and monster drugstores, it is in the swing of the sports cars, hot rods, convertibles."

"One gets the impression that people come to Los Angeles in order to divorce themselves from the past, here to live or try to live in the rootless pleasure world of an adult child."

"Say, what's up. Straight up, holler! What, I am C-A. Day-Go, L.A., to the Bay. Yeah, it's my shit."

"[Los Angeles is] the world's biggest third-class city."

"The vision of Los Angeles as a dream factory, where everything is shiny and soul-crushingly empty, reworks Hollywood as Moloch, the who devours his own children. Even LA-born , who cleverly chronicled the city in the sixties and seventies, recapitulates the usual conventions. Here is composer , a woman who famously played chess against Marcel Duchamp during his first retrospective in the United States in (he was clothed, she was nude; both understood the power of the ), kissing off her hometown with the quip that "people with brains went to New York and people with faces came to Los Angeles.""

"This firestorm is the big one"

"It’s a great city to be an artist in—the American city to be an artist in, in many ways. It’s much more affordable. It’s where the art schools are. It’s like London. It’s an art school town."

"I used to love to call L.A. when I lived in New York. "What're y'all doin'? Talkin' to TV producers, huh? Bummer. Me? I'm readin' a book! Yeah, we're thinkin' back East! Yeah, we're evolving. Is that "The Big One" I hear in the background? Bye, you lizard scum, bye!""

"Los Angeles has always been a natural home for pornography, even back in the days."

"Boston is among an increasing number of municipalities, universities, and private foundations that have announced plans to divest from fossil fuels. In late October, ahead of the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference, better known as COP26, Auckland, New Zealand; Copenhagen, Denmark; Glasgow, Scotland; Paris; Rio de Janeiro; and Seattle announced commitments to divest from fossil fuel companies and increase investments to make cities more sustainable. Also last month, Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott signed a bill that requires the city’s three pension funds to divest from the fossil fuel industry. Those are in addition to divestment commitments made last year by Berlin; Bristol, England; Cape Town, South Africa; Durban, South Africa; London; Los Angeles; Milan; New Orleans; New York City; Oslo; Norway; Pittsburgh; and Vancouver, Canada. “Cities are at the forefront of tackling the climate emergency and there is real momentum to move investments away from fossil fuels and toward climate solutions,” London Mayor Sadiq Khan, who is chair-elect of C40 Cities, a network of mayors working to confront climate change, said in a statement. “I will continue to encourage more cities to join the movement, and urge national governments and private finance institutions to mobilize more finance to invest directly in cities to support a green and fair recovery.”"

"In Los Angeles, everything is based on driving, even the killings. In New York, most people don't have cars, so if you want to kill a person, you have to take the subway to their house. And sometimes on the way, the train is delayed and you get impatient, so you have to kill someone on the subway. That's why there are so many subway murders; no one has a car."

"Are you with your friends on a rooftop laughing, smoking in L.A., trying to kick the habit."

"Not so long ago, I examined some maps showing juvenile delinquency, diptheria, tuberculosis and murder quotients in a number of cities from New Orleans to Los Angeles. The maps all looked alike. Disease, crime and delinquency were invariably grouped in the same parts of the cities — in the slum districts. That is the cause of crime, not the motion picture."

"The global role of the United States is perhaps the ultimate chapter in that long period of European expansion which had begun in western Europe, and especially on the Atlantic seaboard, during the 15th century. Europe slowly had outgrown its homeland. Its cultural empire eventually formed a long band traversing most of the Northern Hemisphere and dipping far into the Southern. The modern hub of the peoples and ideas of European origin is now New York as much as Paris, or Los Angeles as much as London. In the history of the European peoples the city of Washington is perhaps what Constantinople - the infant city of Emperor Constantine - was to the last phase of the Roman Empire; for it is unlikely that Europeans, a century hence, will continue to stamp the world so decisively with their ideas and inventions."

"When I went to America, her message had so sunk into my ears that I became a radical. I went to America to study at the University of California, where a jurist of international law was teaching. I wanted to take my degree in international law. And that was the period of McCarthyism, of the communist witch hunts—my choices were laid out. To get away from Sunset Boulevard, from the girls with red nail polish, I ran off to Maxwell Street and lived among the Negroes. A week, a month. I felt good with them—they were real, they knew how to laugh. And the day in San Diego when I wasn’t able to get a hotel room because I have olive skin and looked like a Mexican ... well, that helped."

"According to CoreLogic, the median house price in Los Angeles is $456,000. This compares with a median price of $187,000 in Houston. There is a similar story for other cities across the state. I won’t even mention house prices in San Francisco. Higher housing costs are a predictable result of restricting supply; it is far more difficult to arrange a new development in San Francisco, Oakland, Los Angeles or other California population centers than in Texas. Builders will have to meet environmental restrictions and density limits in many areas. The Census Bureau reports that between 1980 and 2010 the number of housing units in Texas increased by 81.9 percent, compared with just 41.3 percent in California."