Oh my God, Guns N' Roses - it's like, jeez, that's what made me move out to Los Angeles. 'Welcome to the Jungle,' you know - it's been a huge inspiration for me.
I don't live in Los Angeles. I work in Los Angeles, and even that - I audition in Los Angeles; I very rarely film in Los Angeles. I don't hang out with producers on my off-hours, so I don't even know what that world is like.
When I was up in Washington state, I always thought, 'I'm going to go to Los Angeles where films are made and stories are told, and they're going to love me and welcome me with open arms.' But, there was no welcoming committee.
Los Angeles has been great to me, and I have a home there, and I'm so lucky I get to do what I do for a living. But I did not go down to Los Angeles really even with the intention of staying.
Los Angeles made me less interested in making my images move. Everything is evolving and regressing. It can be hard to pinpoint which changes are linked to place. I believe California has made me more polite. I get a little surprised when I rediscover how direct and rude Norwegians can be.
Is that a pistol in your pocket or are you just glad to see me? (She made this remark in February 1936, at the railway station in Los Angeles upon her return from Chicago, when a Los Angeles police officer was assigned to escort her home)
I love Los Angeles. I love Seattle, too, which is where we have our home. But the notion of spending a lot of time in Los Angeles has been exciting to me for years. The community down there is great.
There's an uncanniness to living in Los Angeles, from the way you move through the city to the moments of feeling familiarity or deja vu, like you've been somewhere or you know something when you really don't.
If it wasn't for KISS, there would be no Guns N' Roses. Bands like that made Guns N' Roses. We were five guys with five personalities and five different influences. The stars were aligned for us.
I was a very good tennis player in Ottawa, Canada - nationally ranked when I was, like, 13. Then I moved to Los Angeles when I was 15, and everyone in L.A. just killed me. I was pretty great in Canada. Not so much in Los Angeles.
We've got the prettiest girls in the world here in Los Angeles and there's a great music scene. And I learned what I learned about cinema here in Los Angeles so it's always been really important to me as a city to live in and I love making movies about it.
Los Angeles is Hollywood and Hollywood is Hollywood Blvd. It's the first thing you want to see. It's the only thing really that you know about as far as Los Angeles is concerned. And so you go and you look at Joan Crawford's hands and feet and the whole history of American filmmaking is encapsulated in that one little area on that one street. That street, to me, has always been the street of dream.
Los Angeles, give me some of you! Los Angeles come to me the way I came to you, my feet over your streets, you pretty town I loved you so much, you sad flower in the sand, you pretty town!
The Olympics have been an amazing part of Los Angeles' history. In many ways in 1932, they put us on the map when people didn't even know where Los Angeles was. In 1984, they were the first profitable Olympics of the modern era.
I moved from Boston to Los Angeles, and took every opportunity that came along my way, trusting that God had a great plan for my life, giving me the willpower to move forward in a positive direction that gave me a feeling of purpose, joy and artistic freedom to fully express myself.
God, Atlantis was only yesterday. Let alone Los Angeles. Remember that incarnation in Los Angeles?
Big Star invented a vision of bohemian rock & roll cool that had nothing to do with New York, Los Angeles or London, which made them completely out of style in the 1970s, but also made them an inspiration to generations of weird Southern kids.