Hollywood Quotes
More Hollywood Quotes
If my books had been any worse, I should not have been invited to Hollywood, and if they had been any better, I should not have come.
Raymond Chandler— 1945 Letter to Charles W Morton,12 Dec.
The average Hollywood film star's ambition is to be admired by an American, courted by an Italian, married to an Englishman and have a French boyfriend.
Katharine Hepburn— 1954 In the Journal American, 22 Feb.
I hopped off the plane at LAX with a dream and my cardigan. Welcome to the land of fame excess - am I going to fit in? I jump into the cab, here I am for the first time, I look to the right and I see the Hollywood sign.
miley cyrus— Party in the USA, her second hit song
Inside this Hollywood playboy is a someway decent actor waiting for a chance to prove it. But, since Hollywood will never give me that chance, I drink to
Dario Fo— controversial plays and revues deal with political themes. His plays include Accidental Death of an Anarchist (1970) and Trumpets and Raspberries (1984). He was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in1997.
Daniel Day Lewis has what every actor in Hollywood wants: talent. And what everyactor in England wants: looks.
— 1995 In The Independent,13 May.
Throughout Jack's violin solo at the Hollywood Bowl, the audience was glued to their seats. That was the only way he could get them to sit down.
jack benny— Zubin Mehta in Irving Fein, Jack Benny: an Intimate Biography (1976), Volume 2, page 154.
[Hollywood] hates America.
james carville— The Colbert Report, 9/20/06
[Hollywood] is a very male business, and it has in vast portions of it — the whole action movie part of it might as well be the United States Army in 1943 in that the ethics of it are, you know, boot camp and action movies and guns and explosions and all the rest of it, and that – so that means that about 50% of the business is not only pretty much closed off to women, but women don’t even wanna be in it!
Nora Ephron— In the documentary Dreams on Spec (2007)
People in Hollywood are not showmen, they're maintenance men, pandering to what they think their audiences want.
terry gilliam— IMDB profile
"Movies in Hollywood now, for the past 20 or 30 years, are made mainly by lawyers or agents."
jean-luc godard— ibid.
“Oh, nobody would ever want to know me in Hollywood. I’m far too puffin-faced for that, too weird-looking. No, I think I’ll probably stick to telly, if telly’ll have me, though I wouldn’t mind doing radio plays as well.”
tamsin greig— About if she would go to Hollywood.
Taking a year off and going to school was the best thing I could have done after The Princess Diaries. It taught me that I don't need Hollywood or a job to make me happy.
anne hathaway— As quoted at Teenpeople.com (May 2002)
We’re making tin gods out of those poor buffoons in Hollywood; I dote on movies and appreciate the scanty art therein but I consider the profession about the most debased and debasing I know.
robert e. howard— From a letter to Tevis Clyde Smith (week of February 20, 1928)
Little man stood at the Mayor's door,No one had ever seen him before,Dressed in clothes of a gayer moodThan ever are seen in Hollywood.
malvina reynolds— Song The Pied Piper
Why westerns get segregated into a genre in Hollywood, I don't know... It's just good entertainment.
tom selleck— Interview with American Western Magazine (January 2001).
In Hollywood, you just kind of fail upwards.
kevin smith— On Jon Peters becoming a producer
It's great to be black in Hollywood. When a black actor does something, it seems new and different just by virtue of the fact that he's black.
will smith— "Will Smith" article in Halliwell's Who's Who in the Movies (2001 edition), p. 406
Hollywood dishes out too much praise for small things I won't let it get me, but too much praise can turn a fellow's head if he doesn't watch his step.
james (jimmy) stewart— As quoted in "Hollywood legend Jimmy Stewart dead at 89" at CNN (2 July 1997)
Hollywood is Hollywood. There’s nothing you can say about it that isn’t true, good or bad. And if you get into it, you have no right to be bitter — you’re the one who sat down, and joined the game.
orson welles— Quoted in The Orson Welles Story
The people who’ve done well within the [Hollywood] system are the people whose instincts, whose desires [are in natural alignement with those of the producers] — who want to make the kind of movies that producers want to produce. People who don’t succeed — people who’ve had long, bad times; like [Jean] Renoir, for example, who I think was the best director, ever — are the people who didn’t want to make the kind of pictures that producers want to make. Producers didn’t want to make a Renoir picture, even if it was a success.
orson welles— Quoted in The Orson Welles Story
Security, for me, took a tumble not when I read that there were Communists in Hollywood but when I read your editorial in praise of loyalty testing and thought control. If a man is in health, he doesn't need to take anybody else's temperature to know where he is going.
— Letter to the New York Herald Tribune (1947-11-29)
Hollywood is wonderful. Anyone who doesn't like it is either crazy or sober.
Raymond Chandler— As quoted in Hollywood Remembered : An Oral History of Its Golden Age (2002) by Paul Zollo
For better or worse, we are the Court of Appeals for the Hollywood Circuit. Millions of people toil in the shadow of the law we make, and much of their livelihood is made possible by the existence of intellectual property rights. But much of their livelihood - and much of the vibrancy of our culture - also depends on the existence of other intangible rights: The right to draw ideas from a rich and varied public domain, and the right to mock, for profit as well as fun, the cultural icons of our time.
alex kozinski— Discussing the right of publicity issue raised in the case White v. Samsung Elec. Am., Inc., 989 F.2d 1512 (9th Cir. 1993). [1]
Hollywood no longer offers entertainment. Instead, activism has replaced acting, and sermons have supplanted stories. Instead of a good yarn, you get a yawn.
ilana mercer— "2 Movie Gems Amid a Lot of Hollywood Hooey," WorldNetDaily.com, July 6, 2007.
Woman is [...] finally screwing and your groin and buttocks and thighs ache like hell and you're all wet and maybe bloody and it wasn't like a Hollywood movie at all but jesus at least you're not a virgin any more but is this what it's all about? And meanwhile he's asking, "Did you come?"
robin morgan— "Barbarous Rituals", in Going Too Far: The Personal Chronicle of a Feminist, p 110.
Hollywood movies of the Fifties, like The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur , with their epic clash of pagan and Judeo-Christian cultures, tell more about art and society than the French-infatuated ideologues who have made a travesty of the “best” American higher criticism.
camille paglia— p. 208 (Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders : Academe in the Hour of the Wolf)
There's an old saying in Hollywood: It's not the length of your film, it's how you use it.
ben stiller— Reported in Inside Oscar 2 (2002) by Damien Bona
If people would only realize when they ask me why I don't do a picture with him - they ask me that all the time, and were quite keen on it while I was in Hollywood - if they'd only realize that he's gone 'way ahead of me. Why I couldn't begin to keep up with him. I couldn't even reach the steps he throws away.
— Adele Astaire op. cit. (Dance partners on Astaire)
