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
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
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
As I holed up in the City of Angels, I was also aware of a comforting feeling of anonymity. In the world's biggest third-class city I could pass unnoticed. I spoke the language. I was familiar with the currency. I could drink the water. I could almost breathe the air, late April air, compounded of interesting hydrocarbons.
JOHN DANN MACDONALD
A Deadly Shade of Gold
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
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
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
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
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
An afternoon drive from Los Angeles will take you up into the high mountains, where eagles circle above the forests and the cold blue lakes, or out over the Mojave Desert, with its weird vegetation and immense vistas. Not very far away are Death Valley, and Yosemite, and Sequoia Forest with its giant trees which were growing long before the Parthenon was built; they are the oldest living things in the world. One should visit such places often, and be conscious, in the midst of the city, of their surrounding presence. For this is the real nature of California and the secret of its fascination; this untamed, undomesticated, aloof, prehistoric landscape which relentlessly reminds the traveller of his human condition and the circumstances of his tenure upon the earth. "You are perfectly welcome," it tells him, "during your short visit. Everything is at your disposal. Only, I must warn you, if things go wrong, don't blame me. I accept no responsibility. I am not part of your neurosis. Don't cry to me for safety. There is no home here. There is no security in your mansions or your fortresses, your family vaults or your banks or your double beds. Understand this fact, and you will be free. Accept it, and you will be happy."
CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD
Exhumations
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
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
The whole city gives you the impression of impermanence. You have the feeling that one day someone is going to yell, "Cut! Strike it!" and then the stagehands will scurry out and remove the mountains, the movie-star homes, the Hollywood Bowl--everything.
ALLAN SHERMAN
attributed, 1001 Greatest Things Ever Said about California
The difference between Los Angeles and yogurt is that yogurt comes with less fruit.
RUSH LIMBAUGH
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
Los Angeles makes the rest of California seem authentic.
JONATHAN CULLER
attributed, Thank God for the Atom Bomb: And Other Essays
Just as the gladiators laid bare the mentality of the Romans, L.A.'s obsession with dramatic freeway chases may reveal a scar at the bottom of our collective psyche.
GREGORY RODRIGUEZ
"Freeway Radicals", Los Angeles Magazine, May 1998
Los Angeles is like San Diego's older, uglier sister that has herpes.
JUSTIN HALPERN
Sh*t My Dad Says