quotations about Los Angeles
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
The smog was heavy, my eyes were weeping from it, the sun was hot, the air stank, a regular hell is L.A.
JACK KEROUAC
The Dharma Bums
Either you bring the water to L.A. or you bring L.A. to the water.
ROBERT TOWNE
Chinatown
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
No second chances in the land of a thousand dances, the valley of ten million insanities.
RY COODER
Los Angeles Stories
Holy the lone juggernaut! Holy the vast lamb of the middle class! Holy the crazy shepherds of rebellion! Who digs Los Angeles IS Los Angeles!
ALLEN GINSBERG
"Footnote to Howl", Howl and Other Poems
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
In Los Angeles, everything is 100 percent organic, except the people.
KRIS KIDD
I Can't Feel My Face
When it's 20 below in New York, it's 78 in L.A. When it's 110 in New York, it's 78 in L.A. Of course, there are 8 million interesting people in New York, and only 78 in L.A.
NEIL SIMON
attributed, Hollywood: And the Best of Los Angeles
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
Fall is my favorite season in Los Angeles, watching the birds change color and fall from the trees.
DAVID LETTERMAN
The Late Show with David Letterman
The streets of L.A. undulate over short hills as though a finger is poking the landscape from underneath ... laid over this crosshatch are streets meandering on the diagonal creating a multitude of ways to get from one place to another by traveling along the hypotenuse. These are the avenues of the tryst which enable Acting Student A to travel the eighteen miles across town to Acting Student B's garage apartment in nine minutes flat after a hot-blooded phone call at midnight.
STEVE MARTIN
Pure Drivel
L.A. 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. L.A. is a jungle.
JACK KEROUAC
On the Road
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
It has been said that Los Angeles is a town of destinations, a metropolis so vast and disjointed that our days are spent in a succession of road trips--to a restaurant in Pasadena, to a bookstore in Brentwood, to a ball game in Chavez Ravine, to a pub in Hollywood. We do not wander by foot, discovering L.A. by accident. We get in our cars, subjecting ourselves to freeway cataclysms and parking indignities, confident that our end point will be rewarding enough to justify the exertion.
JESSE KATZ
"Window Shopping", Los Angeles Magazine, Nov. 2003
I expected Los Angeles to be slick and modern, but overall it had a rundown look and feel to it. Sort of like Denver. Sort of like every city in America I've lived in, except San Francisco, which looks cool.
GARY REILLY
Ticket to Hollywood
Los Angeles is the evolutionary edge.
ROBERT CRAIS
Los Angeles Magazine, Jun. 1996
Los Angeles is seven suburbs in search of a city.
ALFRED HITCHCOCK
attributed, The Mammoth Book of Great British Humour
My problem with L. A. was that I could see the air I was breathing, I don't particularly like crowds, and I was much better at snowboarding than I was at surfing.
FREDERICK LENZ
Snowboarding to Nirvana
I'm in Los Angeles today;
garbage cans comprise the medians
of freeways always creeping
even when the population's sleeping.
And I can't see why you'd want to live here.
DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE
"Why You'd Want to Live Here", The Photo Album