Prejudices are useless. Call Los Angeles any dirty name you like--Six Suburbs in Search of a City, Paradise with a Lobotomy, anyth...ing--but the fact remains that you are already living in it before you get there.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Cities are ... distinguished by the catastrophic forms they presuppose and which are a vital part of their essential charm. New Yo...rk is King Kong, or the blackout, or vertical bombardment: Towering Inferno. Los Angeles is the horizontal fault, California breaking off and sliding into the Pacific: Earthquake.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It's like a jumble of huts in a jungle somewhere. I don't understand how you can live there. It's really, completely dead. Walk al...ong the street, there's nothing moving. I've lived in small Spanish fishing villages which were literally sunny all day long everyday of the week, but they weren't as boring as Los Angeles.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I used to like this town.... Los Angeles was just a big dry sunny place with ugly homes and no style, but good-hearted and peacefu...l.... Now ... we've got the big money, the sharpshooters, the percentage workers, the fast dollar boys, the hoodlums out of New York and Chicago and Detroit--and Cleveland. We've got the flash restaurants and night clubs they run, and the hotels and apartment houses they own, and the grifters and con men and female bandits that live in them. The luxury trades, the pansy decorators, the Lesbian dress designers, the riff-raff of a big hardboiled city with no more personality than a paper cup.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The freeway experience ... is the only secular communion Los Angeles has.... Actual participation requires a total surrender, a co...ncentration so intense as to seem a kind of narcosis, a rapture-of-the-freeway. The mind goes clean. The rhythm takes over.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when word o...f the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community, and in a sense this is true. The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... when I finish reading People, I always feel that I have just spent four days in Los Angeles. Women's Wear Daily at least makes... me feel dirty; People makes me feel that I haven't read or learned or seen anything at all.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If Los Angeles has been called "the capital of crackpots" and "the metropolis of isms," the native Angeleno can not fairly attribu...te all of the city's idiosyncrasies to the newcomer--at least not so long as he consults the crystal ball for guidance in his business dealings and his wife goes shopping downtown in beach pajamas.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In Washington, the first thing people tell you is what their job is. In Los Angeles you learn their star sign. In Houston you're t...old how rich they are. And in New York they tell you what their rent is.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »