quotations about Los Angeles
You know you're in L.A. when you put air in your tires and they cough.
MILTON BERLE
Milton Berle's Private Joke File
Los Angeles has no seasons, so it's kind of hard to keep track of time here. The lines between spring, summer, fall, and winter all blur like my vision. I get stuck on repeat for different measures of eternity.
KRIS KIDD
I Can't Feel My Face
L.A. has been so relentlessly anti-history -- for more than 100 years we have billed ourselves as the city of the future, free of the strictures that entangled the East Coast or Dead Europe -- that it's easy to forget how much of the past remains with us. Maybe because our past is so immediate, we have come to savor it with an intensity that sometimes borders on the ferocious or the foolish. How else do you explain the fierce fight to save the early McDonald's stand in Downey or to preserve the Studio City Car Wash? I have come to think that the flip side of L.A.'s passion for the new is an often self-conscious obsession with the old. Los Angeles is still in its adolescence, and so like a teenager who suddenly realizes that his parents were around before he was born, we understand with gawky earnestness that who we are and where we come from are wrapped up together.
KIT RACHLIS
"Out of the Past", Los Angeles Magazine, Nov. 2003
As an economic entity, greater Los Angeles is world class. If the area were an independent country, it would have a gross national product greater than that of Mexico or Australia.
CLIFFORD L. LINEDECKER
Night Stalker
I'd move to Los Angeles if New Zealand and Australia were swallowed up by a tidal wave, if there was a bubonic plague in England and if the continent of Africa disappeared from some Martian attack.
RUSSELL CROWE
attributed, 1001 Greatest Things Ever Said about California
The freeway experience ... is the only secular communion Los Angeles has. Mere driving on the freeway is in no way the same as participating in it. Anyone can "drive" on the freeway, and many people with no vocation for it do, hesitating here and resisting there, losing the rhythm of the lane change, thinking about where they came from and where they are going. Actual participation requires total surrender, a concentration so intense as to seem a kind of narcosis, a rapture-of-the-freeway. The mind goes clean. The rhythm takes over.
JOAN DIDION
The White Album
People cut themselves off from their ties of the old life when they come to Los Angeles. They are looking for a place where they can be free, where they can do things they couldn't do anywhere else.
TOM BRADLEY
attributed, 1001 Greatest Things Ever Said about California
Los Angeles is the great experiment. The things we are going through now, the whole country will be going through in a few years.
GARY PHILLIPS
Los Angeles Magazine, Jun. 1996
These days, the City of Angels wasn't the easygoing place it had once been--and the hope of actually finding anyone living even an approximation of an angelic existence was slim indeed. Devils, yes: Those were relatively easy to locate.
DEAN KOONTZ
Dark Rivers of the Heart
Real cities have something else, some individual bony structure under the muck. Los Angeles has Hollywood -- and hates it. It ought to consider itself damn lucky. Without Hollywood it would be a mail order city. Everything in the catalogue you could get better somewhere else.
RAYMOND CHANDLER
The Little Sister
Even Mother Nature seems to have a warm spot for L.A.'s four-wheeled citizenry. Mild temperatures, little rain, no snow or ice -- Los Angeles is a virtual humidor for fine automobiles.
ANONYMOUS
"StarCARS", Los Angeles Magazine, Jan. 2000
LA's a really great place to be if your movie's number one at the box office, or if your television show's a hit, but the rest of the time you're just...
KEVIN BACON
The Guardian, May 20, 2017
Los Angeles is like San Diego's older, uglier sister that has herpes.
JUSTIN HALPERN
Sh*t My Dad Says
Los Angeles is full of anomalies, but none is more striking than the confluence of urban grit and natural beauty. For all the strip malls and housing developments that have metastasized over the landscape, wilderness still surrounds and courses through L.A.
KIT RACHLIS
"Trailing Away", Los Angeles Magazine, Jul. 2004
Los Angeles is a town where status is all and status is only given to success. Dukes and millionaires and playboys by the dozen may arrive and be glad-handed for a time, but they are unwise if they choose to live there because the town is, perhaps even creditably, committed to recognising only professional success, and nothing else, to be of lasting value. The burdensome obligation imposed on all its inhabitants is therefore to present themselves as successes, because otherwise they forfeit their right to respect in that environment ... There is no place in that town for the "interesting failure" or for anyone who is not determined on a life that will be shaped in a upward-heading curve.
JULIAN FELLOWES
Past Imperfect
In Los Angeles you get the sense sometimes that there's a mysterious patrol at night: when the streets are empty and everyone's asleep, they go erasing the past. It's like a bad Ray Bradbury story.
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON
The Independent, Jun. 24, 2012
Los Angeles, or Southern California as a whole, constitutes a social world of its own that is peculiarly disordered, speeded up, and artificial. The popular idea (substantiated to a degree by historians) is that because California was for so long the special end point of the westering dream, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow of hopes of countless pioneers, it has received more than its share of restless visionaries and misfits and is therefore a more intensely neurotic version of the neurotic life of modern America.
JANIS P. STOUT
The Journey Narrative in American Literature
The difference between Los Angeles and yogurt is that yogurt comes with less fruit.
RUSH LIMBAUGH
attributed, 1001 Greatest Things Ever Said about California
We live in Los Angeles, where you are expected to move every two to four years, so people can see how well your career is going.
RITA RUDNER
stand-up routine
In order to get the worst possible first impression of Los Angeles one should arrive there by bus, preferably in summer and on a Saturday night.
CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD
"Los Angeles", Horizon, Oct. 1947