Quotes About California

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.

Now for good or ill, California is the place where trends tend to be set in Western civilization - if civilization indeed it is. California, for several generations now, has been the newest, biggest, most experimental place in the newest, biggest, most experimental part of liberal Western capitalism - which is itself a new experiment for mankind.

If I was going for the popular vote I would've won easily. But I would've been in California and New York. I wouldn't have been in Maine. I wouldn't have been in Iowa. I wouldn't have been in Nebraska and all of those states that I had to win in order to win this. I would've been in New York, I would've been in California. I never even went there.

You know, something like 90 people who have now filed to run for governor in this recall election. They say there could be as many as 200 people on the ballot. You know, it's really easy to run here in California. All you need is like a couple of signatures, not many, thirty-five hundred bucks, you're on the ballot, like that. I mean, what does it say about California? We have stricter requirements to get on 'American Idol' than we do to run for governor.

Governor Gray Davis has asked the California state Supreme Court to delay the October recall vote because he says that's not enough time to put on a fair election. Hey, let me tell you something. If we didn't need a fair election to pick the president of the United States, we don't need a fair election to pick the governor of California.

Economic growth and environmental preservation are two sides of the same coin. There's no better illustration of that point than the California Clean Tech Open, which challenges California entrepreneurs to bring new, clean technologies to market. I encourage business leaders, policy makers, and environmental advocates to support this innovative, exciting competition.

According to the California Hospital Association, health care for illegal aliens is costing state taxpayers well over $1 billion a year. Eighty-four hospitals across California have already been forced to close because of unpaid bills by illegal aliens.

Likewise, 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.

Living 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.

I was raised with the Bible Belt mentality, and by coming to California, I came out of this dark place and unlearned a lot of things I'd been taught.

My father has positional vertigo, and if he flies he gets really dizzy, so he has to drive out to California, which he does a couple times a year. We talk, but we e-mail mostly.

When abused children under court protection were studied in California and Massachusetts, it turned out that a disproportionate number of them were unattractive...abused kids had head and face proportions that made them look less infantile and cute.

If there was any other place I would live, other than Miami, it would be California. It's beautiful. The weather is just gorgeous, I love being here, too.

Yesterday, 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.

California has all the beauties of youth as well as its idiocies and vices.

The first treasure California began to surrender after the Gold Rush as the oldest: her land.

There are some forty thousand children in California, according to the red brief, that live with same-sex parents, and they want their parents to have full recognition and full status. The voice of those children is important in this case, don't you think?

I grew up in Louisiana and I think people get it confused. They assume that I lived in California or that's where I'm from. I worked there, but I didn't live there.

Once I'm done, I'm done. I'm going to California.

How does the [New York] Times treat White pathology? They reported an epidemic of heroin addiction in the Philadelphia suburbs. which included emergency admissions and overdoses; these White people in the suburbs were doing heroin like it was going out of style. I counted the words: the article consisted of 200 words. "Heroin Epidemic" in the back section. Out here in California, the typical drug addict is a housewife or suburban White woman.

For the first time American astronauts on the International Space Station ate vegetables grown in space. In other words, even space is getting more rain than California.

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.

My mom blames California for me being a lesbian. Everything was fine until you moved out there. That's right, Mom, we have mandatory lesbianism in West Hollywood. The Gay Patrol busted me, and I was given seven business days to add a significant amount of flannel to my wardrobe.

It is extremely important that individuals in the state of California do not own assault weapons. I mean that is just so crystal clear, there is no debate, no discussion.

Lancaster, California ... that promised land sometimes called 'the west coast of Iowa.

Maybe it's because we as writers are alone so often, are so attuned to listening to the run of our own thoughts, that we find it more natural to write down the thoughts rather than the deeds of our characters. But speaking as a teacher who has spent some twenty years slogging through manuscripts where thoughts and exposition pile up as thick as the aftermath of a California mudslide, I can attest to the power of the evocative detail, gesture, or figment of speech.

Pompeii, especially, with its grand murals and its flourishing gardens haunted by the dark shadow of Vesuvius, has always suggested uncomfortable parallels with our contemporary world, especially here in Southern California, where the sunlit life also turns out to have dark shadows in which failure and death lurk at the edge of consciousness. Now in these times, we have even closer parallels with those ancient, beautiful, affluent people living the good life on the verge of annihilation.

Poem (Lana Turner has collapsed!) Lana Turner has collapsed! I was trotting along and suddenly it started raining and snowing and you said it was hailing but hailing hits you on the head hard so it was really snowing and raining and I was in such a hurry to meet you but the traffic was acting exactly like the sky and suddenly I see a headline LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED! there is no snow in Hollywood there is no rain in California I have been to lots of parties and acted perfectly disgraceful but I never actually collapsed oh Lana Turner we love you get up

I'm from California, I know what's up with this. You keep raising people's taxes eventually they are going to say no.

The truth is in California you can't build a new manufacturing facility, and businesses are leaving in droves because of bad government policy.

One of the things I had a hard time getting used to when I came to California in '78 was Santa Claus in shorts.

But the truth is, growing up in California, we knew nothing about hockey.

I hate these people, the Rams and their owner, Georgia Frontiere, for what they did, taking the Rams logo with them when they moved to St. Louis. That logo belonged to Southern California.

Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard. Live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes you soft

There's a case in Baton Rouge, haunting me, where a mother left her twelve-year-old daughter to be babysat (every day for months) by a known pedophile and his four perverse friends, and the news broke of the bodies of two children, dead after long-term physical abuse, found in a storage locker in California. What hardest for me is, I suppose, what's hardest for my country

When you touch me there, honey, makes my blood perspire, you got my body flaming like a California fire. Pulsing, pounding, pushing no longer in control, heatwave in my brain, smolder in my soul.

I'm very stodgy. I'm always looking at old photos of California and Los Angeles, knowing that what I'm looking at is now full of houses. There used to be vacant lots in Los Angeles, now all taken up by three-storey boxes - it's all getting infilled.

In the 1990s I got to play in a group that played in prisons in California. We would play in maximum security wards. It was infuriating. Those kinds of situations stick with me. We got to come in and play music for them because that's a way of caring, just offering something, a gift, basically. They're basically the most grateful audiences I've ever experienced, because nobody's giving them anything.

I love California. I love Hollywood.

I have to entertain myself. An easy way to explain it is I worked in NY since I was five-years-old doing modeling and commercials, and that's a completely different world than in California where I think there's different dreams and aspirations of maybe being a so-called 'star' and so forth. Here you do your work, whether it's theater or commercials.

A guy friend and I went to California Pizza Kitchen, and a group of pretty girls came over to us and said, 'You guys are gay, right?

Donald Trump singled out three particular states where he claimed there was, quote, "serious voter fraud" - Virginia, New Hampshire and California. Trump lost all three of those states.

It started with Ronald Reagan, when he took away the financing to the California universities. It used to be cheap to send your kids to the UCs. They'd call it an investment, because the more you educate people, the more they'll pay in taxes, because they'll get better jobs. But Reagan said, "No, it's a cost, so you're going to have to pay the cost." So now people can't afford to get an education. Anyway, I don't want to get too political, but yeah, I think the spirit of this country is finally coming back, and hopefully it will triumph.

California is full of Mexican culture and Mexican music.

I'm happy wherever I go, whatever I do. I'm happy in Iowa, I'm happy here in California.

I would want to create an amphitheater outside of California where I would play everyday, and then people would have to come to me. I would create all this crazy stage decor and film it. Or I would just stay inside my home and do films. I would be like the modern Maya Deren.

In our public life, California is on the verge of being a failed state, and no state has failed in the history of this country.

I was born in Orange, California and I grew up in Huntington Beach. I started skateboarding when I was five and continued to do so off and on over the years.