Popular quotes about California! Wisdom and inspiration are here!
California belongs to Joan Didion. Not the California where everyone wears aviator sunglasses, owns a Jacuzzi and buys his clothes on Rodeo Drive. But California in the sense of the West. The old West where Manifest Destiny was an almost palpable notion that was somehow tied to the land and the climate and one's own family-an unspoken belief that was passed down to children in stories and sayings.
Michiko KakutaniCalifornia always had been a dream to me. I guess growing up in the 70s with movies like Vanishing Point, The Getaway, and Badlands formed the need for me to leave Germany for California. I'd never even visited before I moved there. When I moved to Los Angeles in 1996 right away I felt at home. Everything was in place and the dream was alive.
Stefanie SchneiderI learned how to sign because when I was growing up in California in order to get into college you needed two semesters of language to get into a University of California school.
Camryn ManheimWell, my boyfriend's from California so it's kind of a bit of California countryside but closer to home. It just takes a couple of hours to get there. I don't know, it's just very laid back, nobody knows who we are really. We've just got our friends there who are kind of outside Erasure and everything. It's just very nice
Andy BellMany of the people I work with I've worked with in other lifetimes. I moved to California because I knew that many of my students from past lives were in California.
Frederick LenzGoing to the Huntington gardens and libraries was radically important for me. They have one of the best collections of 18th- and 19th-century British portraiture that you can imagine in Southern California. One doesn't think about Southern California as being the capital of great art.
Kehinde WileyCaliforniaโs Proposition 37, which would require that genetically modified (G.M.) foods carry a label, has the potential to do just that - to change the politics of food not just in California but nationally too.
Michael PollanCalifornia has something which not every place in the world has: It has what I would call a sunny side, and I don't mean just physically, but the sunny side is a future. California's worth saving, to put it bluntly.
Nicolas BerggruenLikewise, with solar, especially here in California, we're discovering that the 80 solar farm schemes that are going forward want to basically bulldoze 1,000 sq. mi. of southern California desert. Well, as an environmentalist, we would rather that didn't happen.
Stewart BrandLiving here in California, I think one of the scariest things about California is the fact that it is rewriting its script and changing constantly and so many people don't know who they will be and who they will be with a year from now.
Pico IyerAnd now, of course this is another thing I didn't count on, that now as the governor of the state of California, I am selling California worldwide. You see that? Selling.
Arnold SchwarzeneggerGrowing up in a family that listened to almost nothing but classical music had its effects, as well. "California รber Alles," the first Dead Kennedys single, was inspired musically more by Japanese Kabuki than anything else.
Jello BiafraGrowing up as a kid, we moved all over the country on a fairly frequent basis, from New Jersey to Texas, California, Illinois... we moved 21 times in my first 17 years.
J. Michael StraczynskiThis violence is so pervasive. We see it in our schools, where we have more security guards now than teachers. We see it in California where more prisons are being built than colleges. It goes on and on. We see it in a trillion-dollar war budget, politics becoming an extension of war rather than vice versa. This violence is like a fog. It covers everything.
Henry GirouxWhat I particularly liked was that, coming from California and not being involved in the New York scene, I developed my personal way, in my own way, at my own pace.
Herb RittsWho today is willing to say that Texas and California and the remainder of the Southwest would be better off if they were governed by Mexico?
Stephen AmbroseI finally had to go to the American Civil Liberties Union here in northern California to get my reply published to what I considered to be a hatchet job done by Stanley Crouch.
Ishmael ReedYesterday, Arnold Schwarzenegger announced he would run for governor of California. The announcement was good news for Florida residents who now live in the second flakiest state in the country.
Conan O'BrienI just didn't know what the heck I wanted to do with my life, so I drove out to California and got really lucky.
Krista AllenWell, I think finding the weapons of mass destruction is going to be quite time consuming. I know we've uncovered some documents, we'll have to exploit them, and we're going to have to blanket a country the size of California and search, I think, quite rigorously, but we'll come up with them.
Richard ArmitageWe jumped into the protest of Vietnam before the Black Panther Party ever started, before the Black Panther Party was even thought of. In fact, it was late 1965 and 1966 that the anti-Vietnam War, anti-draft to the Vietnam War protest started at University of California, Berkeley.
Bobby SealeYou want to trace California's move to the far left, you go back to the 1986 Simpson-Mazzoli bill. Simpson-Mazzoli was where we granted amnesty to, at the time, what was three and a half million illegal aliens. And that's it. We were told that would be it. We would start being strict about guarding the borders and making sure that there wasn't any more illegal immigration, but that didn't happen. That was the design. Ted Kennedy, Simpson-Mazzoli, it was their idea here and it's worked out magnificently for them to this extent.
Rush LimbaughRace doesn't mean what it used to in America anymore. It just doesn't. Obama's black, but he's not black the way people used to define that. Is black your experience or the color of your skin? My experience is as a Mexican immigrant, more so than someone like George Lopez. He's from California. But he'll be treated as an immigrant. I am an outsider. My abuelita, my grandmother, didn't speak English. My whole family on my dad's side is in Mexico. I won't ever be called that or treated that way, but it was my experience.
Louis C. K.The California crunch really is the result of not enough power-generating plants and then not enough power to power the power of generating plants.
George W. BushWhen I was at the University of California at Berkeley, I went to some classes that must have had more than four hundred students in them. I almost always sat in the far back of the auditorium so I could read the newspaper. I remember that I stayed late one day to ask the professor a question, and when I got up to him, all I could think to myself was, 'So this is what the professor looks like.
Stephan PastisI was selling real estate at the time, in Pacific Palisades, California, so imagine that: getting a note and a bottle of champagne from Jack Nicholson when I'd barely made a dime as an actor. It really kept me going.
Kurt FullerHollywood is one of those places where, traditionally, money has come from - along with New York, Texas, Florida, Silicon Valley in northern California and the unions. But because of the Internet and the way campaigns are financed these days, you don't need traditional financing as much as you used to - and Barack Obama has tapped into that in a big way. But at the end of the day, people in Hollywood care more about [the presidency] than just the trappings of it and the surface type stuff. They care about the issues.
Rob ReinerCalifornia, in a sense, is almost Starbucks' largest country, with almost 3,000 stores.
Howard SchultzI was born in California. When I was six, we moved to a small town in northern Indiana called Mishawaka.
Adam DriverYear after year, author/historian William Loren Katz continues to mine the lodestone of Black culture, and it is simply amazing how often he manages to find new treasures. Here, with the same insight he brought to Black Indians and his other books, the author traces the courageous role of Black women in settling the West. He deftly shows how these pioneering spirits helped stabilize early communities in Texas, Oklahoma, California and elsewhere.
Herb BoydLooking at the sky last night and the moon in the first fresh dark, just a few stars, bright with their cold flares, I had a little crumpled thought, 'Oh well, the moon. It's just another place like California.' One's imagination drags its feet as we are inexorably hauled into the future.
James SchuylerThe sixteen hundred dairies in Californiaโs Central Valley alone produce more waste than a city of twenty-one million people-thatโs more than the populations of London, New York, and Chicago combined.
Gene BaurThere are things about the South - the politics, the classism, the racism - that I hate, and I want to be here to fight those things. I don't want to be in California or Michigan just complaining about them. I'm here trying to make a difference in the way I can, writing about it. And I want younger people, especially kids from my community, to see that being successful doesn't have to mean leaving a place like this. You don't have to trade in your family or your sense of belonging for that.
Jesmyn WardCalifornia is the only state in the union where you can fall asleep under a rose bush in full bloom and freeze to death.
W. C. FieldsPlacing a wedge of lime in the neck of a Corona bottle helps sell those beers. And where did that ritual come from? One story has it that two bartenders in California were curious how fast a ritual could spread. Astonishingly fast, they discovered.
Martin LindstromOne of the things I had a hard time getting used to when I came to California in '78 was Santa Claus in shorts.
Dennis FranzClearly, high energy prices will have a large negative effect on the California economy and could possibly drag the rest of the nation into a recession.
Doug OseThe girls in California were probably prettier in a standard sense than the New York girls--blonder and in better health, I guess; but I still preferred the way the girls in New York looked--stranger and more neurotic (a girl always looked more beautiful and fragile when she was about to have a nervous breakdown).
Andy WarholMy Christmas present to myself each year is to see how much air travel can open up the world and take me to places as far from sheltered California and Japan as possible.
Pico IyerCalifornia has often led the country, indeed the world, in the technology, consumption, trends, lifestyles, and of course, mass entertainment. It is where the car found its earliest and fullest expression, where suburbs blossomed, where going to gym replaced going to church, where forces that lead so many to assume that direct democracy is the wave of the future - declining political parties, telecommuting, new technology, the internet generation 0 are all most well developed in this vast land.
Fareed ZakariaCalifornia must be all American or all Chinese. We are resolved that it shall be American, and are prepared to make it so. May we not rely upon your sympathy and assistance?
Denis KearneyWhen I was in the California legislature in the '80s, the organic growers, who were sort of the small hippie farmers in those days, brought it to my attention that there were no regulations on organic labeling. In essence, anybody could just grow a thing any way they wanted and put 'organic' on it.
Sam FarrI went to the University of California, Santa Cruz for a year, which turned out to be a really vibrant, very intensive intellectual atmosphere where you could do a lot of aspect of music without it being a conservatory. And that's why I went there.
Tod MachoverI know one thing - very few writers in Southern California get to write what they want to write. We are more or less worker ants, working for either film companies or tv companies or Internet companies. We do a lot of assigned work. Feelings hardly ever enter into it. If they do, they tend to be on a sort of soap opera level.
Larry Gelbart