I have about 1,000 hours of myself on tape in a vault in Los Angeles. But I also have a photographic memory about my jokes, because they're really about me; they're my stories.
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.
Since I have spent many years of my life living in Los Angeles, and since I'm also in the music business, I know that much more is talked about in Los Angeles than ever really occurs.
I am proud to be in Los Angeles. I have a lot of fans that love me here. When you talk about the Meccas of boxing - Las Vegas, New York - now you have to talk about Los Angeles.
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.
It took me 14 years to write 'Crazy Brave' because I kept changing the form and I also kept running away from the story. I said I don't really want to write about myself. But it's about writing about memory.
I submerged myself in all the information that I could find about Idi Amin. I mean, before I left Los Angeles, I was studying Kiswahili. I was working on the dialect. I was studying every documentary and tape of him that I could find - not just visual, but also audiocassettes, even in other languages when he was speaking in other dialects.
To write more from memory and to be more creative - I think - because I am still writing about Los Angeles but I can't walk out my door and immediately drive to places I am writing about. So I think it has been a very good change for me after 11 books to start writing this way.
I love Los Angeles, and I've secretly always wanted to do a song about Los Angeles, but it's a hard thing to pull off.
On thinking about Hell, I gather
My brother Shelley found it was a place
Much like the city of London. I
Who live in Los Angeles and not in London
Find, on thinking about Hell, that it must be
Still more like Los Angeles.
Now I'm writing about contemporary Los Angeles from memory. My process was to hang out, observe, research what I was writing about, and almost immediately go back to my office and write those sections. So it was a very close transfer between observation and writing.
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.
The thing that really surprised me about strip malls in California, specifically Los Angeles, is that they have some really fantastic restaurants.
I love Los Angeles. I love when people make fun of it. I think, 'Good, don't come.' All the jokes about it feel out of date.
I just went through my childhood attic with my sister. I'm not an expert, and I don't mean to put myself in that category, but thinking about Malcolm Gladwell and the 10,000 hours, I was like, Here are my 10,000 hours!
Los Angeles has always been overlooked as far as jazz, and just high-level music in general. But, like, my dad's a musician, so I've grown up around so many brilliant musicians that nobody outside Los Angeles knows about.
My mother was a librarian, and she worked at the Black Resource Center in South Central Los Angeles and would call me to tell me stories that she read about that were interesting to her.