Quotes About Hollywood

I didn't go Hollywood on the outside with flashy cars, upstairs maids and mink covered bathroom fixtures. I went Hollywood on the inside and that's worst of all. I tried to avoid being natural. I lowered my voice. I copied the mannerisms of other stars. I struck poses. I received bad advice - from dramatic coaches, from agents, and from studio executives. I stopped being a human being. I blame myself and I blame Hollywood's star system.

I went to Hollywood. I put the action in Hollywood. I watched a lot of movies, maybe 100 or something close to that. I have tons of DVDs now at home. I don't know what to do with them because they're not useful anymore. My kids never watched them. I read a lot of autobiographies, listened to a lot of music by classical era composers like Franz Waxman, Max Steiner, Bernard Herrmann, Alfred Newman and Leonard Bernstein. I listened to only that kind of music the entire time I was writing, even at home.

I consider my relationship with acting in Hollywood as sort of a mutual breakup. Through puberty, Hollywood didn't really want me anymore, and I was like, 'Yeah, I don't really want you, either.'

People are always saying that Hollywood messes up kids. I'm like, 'No, families mess up kids!' I grew up in Hollywood, and I'm perfectly fine. If my children want to go into the entertainment business, I won't stop them, as long as they're passionate about it.

I'm not a Hollywood director. I'm an in spite of Hollywood director.

Hollywood is still the cradle of many myths, including the one of eternal youth. I find it odd that the very notion of desire, when applied to a woman over 40, is turned into a pathology or a mockery in a number of films. But Hollywood is not the only place to blame, by far. This is just a rendition, possibly magnified by the power of movies, of a general state of things, social, cultural and political.

The most remarkable thing about Hollywood is that it does not exist. ... Hollywood, in a word, has no center, never had one, no city hall, court house, church, square, or rather it probably has some of those but they're so aimlessly thrown in with the general jumble ... that I, for one, never found them.

It's very difficult to get any movies done about Black heroes - Haitian or American - in Hollywood. The argument in Hollywood is that there is no market for those movies, and that is not true.

In Hollywood especially, if you're gay and conservative, it's worse to be a conservative in the gay community than it is to be a conservative in Hollywood.

In Hollywood, they put the knife in your front; in D.C., they put it in your back. I found far fewer duplicitous people in Hollywood.

I've sold 11 of my books to Hollywood. There are all kinds of my books on shelves in Hollywood because the scripts didn't capture the characters.

I've been fortunate to have had the life I had prior to Hollywood. I wasn't starving, I was going to eat the next day. I came to Hollywood wanting a career that had longevity, and I wasn't afraid to take risks because I had a dollar in the bank. I wasn't driven by money as much as I was driven by making a successful transition. And I was smart enough to know that I certainly didn't have all the answers and I needed to surround myself with smart people and be willing to take risks and be willing to fail.

Like in [the 1950s] if you wanted to ruin someone´s career in Hollywood you claimed he was a Communist. Nowadays, you want to ruin someone´s career in Hollywood, you claim they are Republican.

Hollywood was invented by hoodlums from central Europe. And today a Hollywood lawyer is not a hoodlum. He's a bureaucrat.

Back in the Bruce Lee era, and in my era, Kung-Fu stirred up a kind of frenzy, and many people were learning martial arts from us. But about a decade ago, Hollywood began bringing in a number of our action choreographers, including two from my own stunt crew, where they became martial arts directors. Now, a decade later, Hollywood has learned it all, so when you look at the action films they're making now, they all use our action, our martial arts, and then add to that their own technology which is ten times better than ours, and it has to leave us dumbfounded: how did they film that?

Hollywood has to appeal to the broadest audience, and when it comes to most social and economic issues, America is progressive. Because of that, the messages that are in Hollywood movies tend to be, for instance, pro-environment.

It just kind of continues to be strange and interesting to me to try to understand what other people are looking for. And this also just comes from getting older. You look at the stuff certainly that's coming out of Hollywood these days, and you go, "Did what came out of Hollywood when I was a kid make more sense, or was it just that I was in the demographic then?" But I certainly feel increasingly confused and disconnected from it.

The good part of what comics trains you to do is it trains you - especially if you've worked in mainstream comics like Marvel and DC, or if you're just doing your own independent comics - to compartmentalize things and work on multiple things at the same time. And that's a skill that is incredibly handy in Hollywood, because within the first year that you get here, you realize there's a reason why every successful person in Hollywood has like seven or eight projects up in the air at any point.

They say that in Hollywood one can't be honest, but I think honesty counts in Hollywood just as much as it does anywhere else. I think it's just too much trouble to be dishonest and keep up with yourself.

You can't find an uglier urban environment than the centre of Hollywood, but then you go to Griffith Park, you go to the beach, you go to the mountains, and it's rural. I live up in the Hollywood Hills and I have frogs, owls, coyotes, mountain lions - but I'm ten minutes from the centre of the city.

Dark, subtle, complex, wicked - if only Hollywood movies were half as interesting as Hollywood accounting.

A lot of times in Hollywood you're as good as your last job.

Each time I get off a plane in Hollywood, I don't think I'm pretty enough.

I'm not going to say I'm a big girl. I'm a very small person, but I'm a healthy weight. That might be a little weird for Hollywood.

Last summer a second unit production crew went to France and shot scenes for several of this seasons episodes. They shot costumed actors in and around real castles and landmarks, we couldnt possibly have duplicated here in Hollywood.

I am so stereotyped into being this Hollywood girl.

If the goal is to get the best artists, actors, and filmmakers in the world to create the best movies, Hollywood does a decent job. And I think no one would disagree with me that it also makes a ton of bad movies and employs a bunch of hacks.

I don't know how Hollywood sees me.

My boobs are, like, huge. My whole life, buying a bra was a nightmare. What I used to do when I moved to LA, I found places like Frederick's of Hollywood that make bras for... strippers.

Meeting people is difficult, period. LA is a difficult place to meet people anyway, and Hollywood is such a small community. But I don't make it a rule just to date other actors and people in the entertainment industry. It could work out with me and a dentist. It could work out with me and a lawyer.

There's more to life than being an actor in a Hollywood movie. I'm not going to adapt my life after that existence, where a lot of people do. And they get the publicist, and they get all that stuff, and it becomes them. I think it's a stupid way to live your life. A really dumb way to live your life.

I don't think I ever understood Hollywood.

People think in Hollywood there's a family, where everybody gets together talks about stuff and we all know each other, and it's just not that way at all to me.

My dad is a motorcycle guy, not some Hollywood dude.

I didn't come to Hollywood to get on magazine covers or start my Porsche collection or to enjoy that kind of lifestyle, to go to the right parties and meet the right people.

If two percent of all the films made in Hollywood are really artistically worthy - and I think it's a lot more than two percent - that's a pretty big percentage of things that will outlive their own generation.

I approach the film business the way I feel about self-esteem. It's something that has to be maintained. That's kind of how I feel about positive roles in Hollywood. They have to be maintained. You have to purposefully, intentionally try to make the right type of films. And the more people that do that, the more things will continue to improve.

And if Hollywood has taught us anything, it's that cool props and special effects are not enough. Story comes first. Everything depends on story.

My first memoir, 'Home,' was about my childhood, early training and formative years in the Theater, i am so pleased that my good friends at the Hachette Book Group have encouraged me to share the next phase of my life, beginning with my arrival in Hollywood and the wonderful movies and television programs I was asked to be a part of.

I'd like to refocus everyone's attention away from the Kardashians and onto Doctors Without Borders or aid workers. Let's redefine scandal. Scandal is not who so-and-so is dating; scandal is the fact that 1.2 million people are still living in tents in Haiti, and cholera is rampant because Nepalese U.N. soldiers dumped s- from their Porta-Potties into the river. That's a f-ing scandal. If the average 15-year-old was hearing about that instead of so-and-so's plastic surgery or cheating in Hollywood, I'd feel better about our future.

I don't think about Hollywood at all.

I think that if Hollywood has a problem, it constantly underestimates the intelligence and integrity of fans. You can be passionate about a show, but I don't think that people are obsessed to the point where it's so manic that they lose themselves and they lose a sense of their center of morality.

If you purposefully look to shock people, it isn't funny. That's what 50 million dollar Hollywood comedies do; try to be shocking and dirty. They aren't really. It isn't enough to shock. It's easy to shock. Real surprise is what I'm after. Those early movies, we had drugs, which you weren't supposed to show. You weren't supposed to shoot up. We would make fun of hippies. I think that we were punk before there was punk.

I always felt that I was born in the wrong era. I wanted to be friends with John Garfield, for instance. He was one of the only actors that refused to testify in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee back when the Hollywood Ten blacklist was happening in the McCarthy period. I wish I could've been friends with Charlie Parker and played with him. That's my period. I feel real close to the '40s - and actually I was born in '37, so I was a kid singing on the radio in the '40s. But I always dreamed of going to big cities.

Comedy Central was a great network, but 'Chappelle's Show' took it to a completely different level. Other shows got bigger because so many viewers were watching the 'Chappelle' reruns. For BET, the 'Real Husbands of Hollywood' has that same potential.

If it isn’t for the writing, we’ve got nothing. Writers are the most important people in Hollywood. And we must never let them know it.

As much as my parents are part of Hollywood, I have no recollection of them giving me advice about it.

Fame doesn't matter. Money doesn't matter. Those things are forever fleeting. I just want to have a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, so that when I'm long gone my great-great-grandchildren can walk up to it and say, "That's my ancestor." That will be my legacy.