In the neighborhood where my studio is, in South Central Los Angeles, there are a lot of immigrant-owned businesses. I’m constantly amazed at the level of work they do. It’s above anything. For me, I think I pattern myself on that work ethic.
In the past, like for the last Rilo Kiley record, ‘Under the Blacklight,’ I wore exclusively hot pants because the themes in that record were the underbelly of Los Angeles.
I think you should check out ‘Battle: Los Angeles’ because it really is a sci-fi movie, but it’s not. It’s not like anything you’ve seen before. The best way to describe it is it’s a war movie that happens to have aliens as the enemy.
We have a project with Unocal here in Los Angeles, where we as an environmental organization, the oil company, and the state all get together to promote the recycling of used motor oil.
Food was always a big part of my life. My grandfather was one of 14 kids, and his parents had a pasta factory, so as a kid, he and his siblings would sell pasta door to door. After he became a movie producer, he opened up De Laurentiis Food Stores – one in Los Angeles and one in New York.
I spent the summers of 1984 and 1985 as an associate pastor at Dolores Mission Church, the poorest parish in the Los Angeles archdiocese. In 1986, I became pastor of the church.
Sometimes people come to my shows and think I’m a Christian artist, and they put their hands up in the air, like they do. But first of all, I’m a Jewish girl from the Valley, and I’m from Los Angeles. It’s funny to be misinterpreted.
I trained in theater. I loved Los Angeles, but I’ve found New York to be successful for me.
Being in Los Angeles is this brutal awakening, where I feel not good enough as soon as I walk into a room, and I’m wearing the wrong thing, or I don’t have enough make up on. It’s all about image.
Los Angeles is an industry town, and it has great facilities and personnel. The disadvantage is that everyone there seems to talk about the same subject matter.
Eventually I did that, but it took a lot of twists and turns, and there were a year or two there where I was living with no money at all – no home, no car, no nothing. I was living in somebody’s garage in Los Angeles at that point – for a year.
I live in Los Angeles, which is the second most polluted city in the world, and I wake up in the morning to dirt all over my window.
I grew up in Chicago, and there was always snow. In Los Angeles there never was, so we would always import snow!
I am quite handy; not to sound bragadocious, but I’ve been working with wood and building things my entire life. I used to be a skateboarder and built ramps with my father. Then, the first two years I lived in Los Angeles, I worked as a carpenter building sets.
I don’t consider Los Angeles home anymore; ultimately, it was pretty negative, but I did spend my formative years in the Valley and all around L.A. proper. Through my teenage years and into my young adulthood, up until the age of 30, I spent a good amount of time there.
I think Los Angeles is often portrayed as kind of a petri dish, where bad decisions start and then spread to the rest of the world. I don’t see it that way. I feel Los Angeles is a place of almost primal struggle and survival. It’s not a city that embraces its inhabitants.
I have three favorite cities: London, Wellington, and Los Angeles. What makes them so good? The friends who live there.
I think every young actor in Los Angeles went up for that role. It was between Frankie Muniz and me, and he pulled out, so I got the role.
Oddly enough, Dame Edna is not interested in show business. Her friends in Los Angeles are mostly in the world of petroleum. She used to have some acting friends. Sadly, Joan Rivers has passed on. Larry Hagman was a close friend. A number of others.
I love how easy it is to run my business, Writing Workshops Los Angeles, with the help of email and my website. I love that I don’t have to use cuneiform, a quill, or a typewriter to write my novels – I love to write on my laptop!
The house where I grew up in the Hancock Park section of Los Angeles was like a dream – even though my family faced threats after my father bought it in August 1948.
I knew if I had gone to school – if I had gone to Juilliard and danced for four years – I would have spent every day wondering what would have happened if I had gone to Los Angeles instead.
Robert Downey Jr. doesn’t work out like us regular folks. Adulation bathes him from the moment he arrives at his Los Angeles martial arts studio.
When I first came to Los Angeles, I was a teacher in Compton. I know how in need schools are around the country.
I feel comfortable here primarily because I think Los Angeles is made up of people who don’t come from here, so you can find kindred spirits very easily. It’s a town of gypsies.
Growing up in Los Angeles, obviously it’s a really fashionable city, but it has a really relaxed quality to it as well. So, my fashion education came while working on ‘Suits’.
I can never remember a time when I didn’t want to be an actress, to be honest. And so, all through high school, I knew that I was gonna go to college in Los Angeles. I just didn’t know where. And I knew that I was gonna try to get my theater degree.
Well, I certainly was exposed to and learned to appreciate the work of great directors early on. As a kid, my mother used to take me to see really interesting arty films in Los Angeles.
A lot of people come to Los Angeles and think that they’re going to be famous, just like that.
I know Charles Michael Davis. I used to play poker with him when I lived in Los Angeles.
Basically, my parents messed up because it was the Sixties, and they both had affairs, but they had a great love for each other. I saw that when my father flew over from Los Angeles when he knew my mother was going to die.
People figure because I’m blonde and was a model, I just waltzed into Los Angeles and got major roles in major films.
The longest road trip I’ve ever been on is from Minnesota to Los Angeles.
One of the first places I was ever recognized after ‘The Office’ came out was at Target in Los Angeles. Someone came up to me, and she said, ‘Are you Phyllis from ‘The Office?” We were in different aisles, but she had recognized my voice.
I had done a couple of auditions for ‘Amistad’ and didn’t feel it was going to go any further – and then the call came about heading to Los Angeles to work with Steven Spielberg. It was surreal: exciting, challenging, overwhelming.
You can have a laugh in Los Angeles, or you can weep in Los Angeles, depending on your attitude towards it.
The thing that really surprised me about strip malls in California, specifically Los Angeles, is that they have some really fantastic restaurants.
Los Angeles is like a beauty parlor at the end of the universe.
Los Angeles is such a town of show business, and I’m a terrible celebrity. I find it difficult – it’s the beast that must be fed. There’s this big wheel of pictures and articles that goes around, and you get pinned on it.
Many of my friends back in New York and elsewhere have a glib or dismissive attitude toward Los Angeles. It’s a place of strip malls and traffic and not much else, in their opinion.
It was when ’21’ came out. I was in Los Angeles and my face was everywhere: on buses, on posters, on the side of buildings. I didn’t feel that blown away by it. I was still hungry to prove myself. I realised that quite quickly, that I had to find something that challenged me from an acting point of view.
A move to MLS – you never know. New York or Los Angeles, you never know.
Giada De Laurentiis, of ‘Everyday Italian,’ is not a chef, although she has culinary expertise – she was trained at the Cordon Bleu and worked as a private cook for a wealthy Los Angeles family.
In 2009, at the Vancouver Peace Summit, I met a supporter of Free the Slaves, an NGO dedicated to eradicating modern-day slavery; weeks later, I flew down to Los Angeles and met with the director of Free the Slaves; thus began my journey into exploring modern-day slavery.
The Raiders moved from Oakland to Los Angeles, didn’t like it, didn’t get along. Whatever it was, moved back to Oakland.
All I came to Los Angeles with was a dream. No one from my family ever left Ohio.
The first thing I ask when I’m offered a part is, Who’s the director? which is something they never understand in Los Angeles.
I loved my time doing ‘Private Practice’ in Los Angeles, and I was quite challenged and excited to learn about the art of television, but I missed being on the stage.
Los Angeles survives on that which is unpredictable. The unexpected courses through its very veins.
I always wished I had a chance to meet an NFL player or even a college player when I was growing up in Los Angeles.
The idea of the beauty of diversity came from just growing up where I grew up. Los Angeles is a very big city – there’s Little Ethiopia, Little Armenia, Little Tokyo, Chinatown, there’s African-Americans, Latinos, Europeans.
From the streets of Los Angeles to the public schools of the Bronx, there is no state of the Union where Latinos are not becoming local leaders and responsible politicians.
I’m a sucker for any band named after a work of literature. Los de Abajo take their name from Mariano Azuela’s famous novel ‘The Underdogs,’ and that says a lot about who they are and the music they make.
