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The 20 Best Quotes About Hollywood And The People Who Inhabit It
Hollywood is concrete and abstract. It's an idea and a place, a synonym for a multi-billion dollar industry, and a nebulous symbol of a dream.
When a husband-and-wife pair of Kansas transplants gave the area its name in 1886, they intended it to be a religious community. That, as you surely know, did not hold. Instead, it became "a place where they'll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your soul," as Marilyn Monroe once said. Hollywood, as English novelist Angela Carter put it, "straddled the world like a Colossus," becoming "the place where the United States perpetrated itself as a universal dream and put the dream into mass production."
Perhaps Raymond Chandler best summarized the role of the artists putting that dream into production when he wrote "If my books had been any worse, I should not have been invited to Hollywood, and if they had been any better, I should not have come."
But come he did, like countless others. Here are some of our favorite quotes about Hollywood--the place, the industry, and the symbol--and the people who inhabit it.
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"We have our factory, which is called a stage. We make a product, we color it, we title it, and we ship it out in cans." -Cary Grant
"Lord, that Hollywood train, forever coming round the bend!" -James Baldwin
"If California is a state of mind, Hollywood is where you take its temperature." -Ross Macdonald
"The most flourishing factory of popular mythology since the Greeks." -Alistair Cooke
"A trip through a sewer in a glass-bottomed boat." -Wilson Mizner
"Hollywood: the only place in the world where a man gets stabbed in the back while climbing a ladder." -William Faulkner
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"Most of the successful people in Hollywood are failures as human beings." --Marlon Brando
"In Hollywood, if you don't have happiness, you send out for it." -Rex Reed
"I am so stereotyped into being this Hollywood girl." -Kim Kardashian
"The only reason I'm in Hollywood is that I don't have the moral courage to refuse the money." -Marlon Brando
"I never said actors are cattle; what I said was all actors should be treated like cattle." -Alfred Hitchcock
"I love Los Angeles, and I love Hollywood. They're beautiful. Everybody's plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic." -Andy Warhol
"I was born at the age of twelve on an MGM lot." -Judy Garland
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"Hollywood is a place where people from Iowa mistake each other for stars." -Fred Allen
"It's Hell, it's Heaven: the amount you earn/ Determines if you play the harp or burn." -Bertolt Brecht
"It's a mining town in Lotus Land." -F. Scott Fitzgerald
"Hollywood's like Egypt, full of crumbled pyramids. It'll never come back. It'll just keep on crumbling until finally the wind blows the last studio prop across the sands." -David O. Selznick
"Hollywood is like being nowhere and talking to nobody about nothing." -Michelangelo Antonioni
"Loneliness beside the swimming pool." -Liv Ullmann
"The biggest electric train any boy ever had!" -Orson Wells
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