I spend a fair chunk of time in Los Angeles, and after about ten days of warmth and unbroken clear skies, you start to yearn for a bit of good old British gloom and rain!
I was born and raised in Los Angeles. I split my time between the West Coast and the East.
I been all around the world and I haven’t found a city that I’d rather be from or rather come back to than Los Angeles.
Each and every one of us has multiple identities, and this is a fact that should be celebrated. I for example, am a queer black woman who grew up poor in Los Angeles.
Los Angeles is like a beauty parlor at the end of the universe.
In New York, all the crews read ‘The New Yorker.’ In Los Angeles, they don’t know from ‘The New Yorker.’
When I was coming up as a kid, there were programs that kept me out of trouble and on the straight and narrow in South Central Los Angeles, and I always felt that when I got to a stage where I could provide similar opportunities to kids then I would do that.
I do live in a couple of worlds. My home is in Kentucky. I fly out to Los Angeles when I’m working.
My parents are both very funny but they’re also relatively soft-spoken, normal human beings while I’m just a lunatic. I don’t know where this loud, ballsy, hammy ridiculousness came from. I’m just glad I followed my goals and my parents did too. It’s not like we even had a plan when I dragged my mom to Los Angeles.
In New York, the theater is a destination point. In Los Angeles, no matter how provocative, how successful, how star-studded the theater event may be, it is, at best, a second-class citizen.
Friends in the Midwest often ask me what it’s like to raise a family in Los Angeles. I say it’s just like where they are, but warmer and with more traffic. I also tell them people here seem a bit more tolerant of those who are different.
There is no right or wrong way of giving. People in Los Angeles have made major contributions in different ways to the city: Eli Broad to art. David Geffen to hospitals. I’m not judgmental.
I was never an ambitious girl, or even a self-confident one. I never went in for beauty pageants or wore a stitch of make-up until I went to Los Angeles.
I realized how Latina I was, and then also, at the same time, how not Latina enough I was, because I’m born and raised in Los Angeles. I speak Spanish, but I don’t speak perfect Spanish, not like a native speaker.
‘The West Wing’ was really important for me for a lot of reasons. It was the first thing I did when I got out to Los Angeles. I’d just finished school, and I was so naive.
I always thought I would move to New York after graduation, but, instead, I moved to Los Angeles. I realized I was more scared of that choice than I was of New York, and I thought, at 22, I should get it over with.
The only Angels in Los Angeles are in Heaven, and they’re looking down on the Dodgers.
I have a passion for modern and contemporary art. I spend a lot of time in museums; I particularly like the Guggenheim, MoMA in New York or LACMA and the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, for example. I cannot wait for the Louis Vuitton Foundation to open.
In Los Angeles, I feel like the ugly duckling, like I’m from Venus or something.
It was like there’s got to be some way to stay working and stay productive in Los Angeles. TV is that kind of thing for an actor. Unless you get stuck in one of these shows where you have to go to Vancouver.
I grew up in Chicago, and there was always snow. In Los Angeles there never was, so we would always import snow!
I’d knocked on doors when I’d gone to theater school in Los Angeles the summer of my junior year, trying to find an agent and submitting headshots, but nobody would see me, and I knew it was virtually impossible to get an audition if you didn’t have an agent.
When I moved to Los Angeles, I thought, ‘Whatever hits, I’ll go that direction. If it’s music, fine; if it’s acting, fine.’
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.
I know a lot of very rich, very successful, very lonely women in Los Angeles, and I never wanted to be one of them.
Political movements and mega sporting events have always gone hand in hand. In 1980, there were Cold War boycotts in Moscow and again in 1984 during Los Angeles Games.
I was born in San Diego, and we moved to Los Angeles when I was seven. A couple of years later, I started acting!
When I moved out to Los Angeles to get some film and television work, and couldn’t get any… I became a little isolated, a little terrified, and it’s a good place to get writing, because you’re so bored. So I wrote a few screenplays, and people notice those.
A lot of the people in Northern California and parts of Oregon have decided that we are not on the same page as San Francisco and Portland and Los Angeles. I don’t know if six states is a solution because is Washington, D.C. and the rest of the country really going to give California 10 new senators?
Los Angeles County is one of the most park-poor urban areas in the nation, and the San Gabriel Valley – stretching from Pasadena to Pomona – is especially starved for open space.
Today, I regularly attend two Buddhist organizations, the Zen Center of Los Angeles and Against the Stream, but I also attend certain Christian functions. I try to cultivate a generous, kind spirit and am open to anything to help get me there.
My favorite thing about Los Angeles is there are businesses that you can call, and they will deliver groceries to your house.
I am in love with Los Angeles.
Try driving the streets of Los Angeles without seeing a billboard depicting a film with a lead actor holding a gun. It’s almost as if guns are harmless props used to bring out the cheekbones and jawline of the screen star.
‘Cars’ is a really personal story for me because, first of all, I grew up in Los Angeles – the car crazy capital.
I have a few homes, and Los Angeles is certainly one of them.
Sprawl is the American ideal way to develop. I believe that what we’re developing in Denver is in no appreciable way different than what we’re doing in Los Angeles – did in Los Angeles and are still doing. But I think we have developed the Los Angeles model of city-building, and I think it is unfortunate.
I wrote two novels about a yoga studio in Los Angeles published by Penguin under the pen name Rain Mitchell.
Los Angeles is one of the four cultural capitals of the world, but we don’t attract as many cultural tourists as New York, London or Paris. I want to change that.
My parents come down to Los Angeles a lot.
In March 2010, I attended an art opening for Kimberly Brooks’s show ‘The Stylist Project’ in Los Angeles. It was a starry celebration hosted by Dior and ‘Vanity Fair’ to benefit P.S. Arts. But even as fun-to-gape-at actresses like Christina Hendricks arrived, I couldn’t take my eyes off the oil portraits.
I grew up in a modest neighborhood just outside of Los Angeles. It was an industrial community of blue-collar, working people… some of the hardest-working people I’ve ever met.
My favorite drive is Highway 101 in California between Los Angeles and San Luis Obispo. I love the 101; Highway 1 is too windy, and 5 is too boring – the 101 is just right. It’s like the Mama Bear of scenic drives.
Cold weather probably played a bigger role in bringing back the hat, but sadly, the hat common to New Jersey guidos, South Carolina rednecks, Idaho potato farmers and Los Angeles gang bangers is the ubiquitous ‘tractor hat,’ which is derived from the cheap baseball style cap with the adjustable plastic tab.
I can rock out anything. I mean, I can rock out a little ‘Time After Time’. I can do a little ‘Grease Lightning’. It depends on the mood, but we do go karaoke, my friends and I in Los Angeles, and it’s a lot of fun.
I really like Los Angeles. I like the weather, the openness of it, the beach, the mountains, the desert. I find it inspiring. I get quite a lot of writing done out there.
‘Battle: Los Angeles’ – I’ve got to say this was easily one of the most physically trying things that I’ve ever done in my life because I play a Marine in the film, and they had us training with real live Marines for, like, three weeks. It gave me a whole new respect for just the armed forces, period.
I no longer have a style to maintain. I rent a little flat in Los Angeles, I don’t take holidays, I don’t dine out and I take cheap flights.
The most romantic thing someone did was surprise me at the airport, after being away for 3 months in Los Angeles. You always see people with signs, and you’re like, ‘Isn’t that lovely?’ and then you see your own name on one – that isn’t a taxi driver’s! I was very impressed.
That’s one of the great things about Los Angeles, that people just play music, and it’s all very welcoming and welcomed.
If we do high-speed rail, the governor has to be intelligent and invest the dollars at the ‘bookends’ – San Francisco and Los Angeles.
I think the paparazzi might have chased me out of Los Angeles.
The day I signed for Chelsea, I had to go around the world – from Los Angeles to Singapore, through London – and I trained. Difficult.
I couldn’t go anywhere unless there was a security guard with me. That spoiled my life. It was like being in captivity. Those days are gone, and I don’t ever want to see that happen to me again. Now I can wander around the streets of Los Angeles on my own. I like it that way.
