December 18th, 2018 | Updated on June 29th, 2022
1. “Any actress who appears in public without being well-groomed is digging her own grave.”
― Joan Crawford
2. “The secret to kicking ass in dumbshit Hollywood… Every time you meet someone, make a fucking impression. Make them think you’re the hottest shit in the world. Make them think they’re gonna lose their job if they don’t give you one. Look ’em in the eye, and never look away. Be confident and calm, be fucking bold.That sounds more like the secret to kicking ass in life. It is, but I was gonna wait and tell you that some other time. ”
― James Frey
3. “Hollywood is a place where they’ll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your soul. I know, because I turned down the first offer often enough and held out for the fifty cents.”
― Marilyn Monroe
4. “Every actor in his heart believes everything bad that’s printed about him.”
― Orson Welles
5. “We didn’t need sex. We had Tyrone Power.”
― Barbara Cartland
6. “It’s [Los Angeles] mostly full of nonsense and delusion and egomania. They think they’ll be young and beautiful forever, even though most of them aren’t even young and beautiful now.”
― Christopher Hitchens
7. “Most of the successful people in Hollywood are failures as human beings.”
― Marlon Brando
8. “I blame Hollywood for skewing perspectives. Life is just a big romantic comedy to them, and if you meet cute, happily ever-after is a forgone conclusion.”
― Jonathan Tropper
9.“Life in the movie business is like the beginning of a new love affair: it’s full of surprises, and you’re constantly getting fucked.”
― David Mamet
10. “In Hollywood, no one knows anything.”
― William Goldman
11. “It’s easier for me to make sense of it that way than it is for me to face the other way—reality. And yet, those evil spirits that were unleashed—be they fake entities from a stupid carnival ride, or cruel malevolencies from dark spiritual chasms of our universe—have stayed with me all these years”
― Tim Cummings
12. “Now we really like to put people in boxes. As men, we do it because we don’t understand characters that aren’t ourselves and we aren’t willing to put ourselves in the skin of those characters and women, I think, terrify us. We tend not to write women as human beings. It’s cartoons we’re making now. And that’s a shame.”
― Paul Haggis
13. “If you think Hollywood is depressing and corrupt, politics is really depressing and corrupt and fueled even more than Hollywood by money if that’s possible.”
― Ben Affleck
14. “Once upon a time, I wrote a book. People seemed to dig it, so I wrote another and one after that. That’s when Hollywood came knocking at my back door. As soon as I cashed that check, I wrapped my lips around the mighty erection that is the film industry and sucked hard, just like a good whore should. Unfortunately, I had to be taught not to orphan the balls.”
― Hank Moody
15. “In Hollywood, the women are all peaches. It makes one long for an apple occasionally.”
― W. Somerset Maugham
16. “Fidelity is a living, breathing entity. On wobbly footing, it can wander, becoming something different entirely.”
― Kay Goodstadt
17. “When you make a film, if you are an insider, you’re usually the last person to know that your film is not right. But when you are an outsider, you have a little more objectivity. I think a part of my success is that I am naturally objective. I am not an insider. In many ways, Anupama is the same. Foreword, First Day First Show”
― Shah Rukh Khan
18. “I leave the kitchen table to bathe, and to dress for church. If only my closet held on its shelves an array of faces I could wear rather than dresses, I would know which face to put on today. As for the dresses, I haven’t a clue.”
― Tim Cummings
19. “Over the years, I have been subjected to many indignities, all for the sake of Art. If I ever catch him, I’m going to kill the guy.”
― Bob Hope
20. “How do we know where we’re going? Follow the moon! Remember, the moon is always over Hollywood, and Needles isn’t far from Hollywood.”
― Charles M. Schulz
21. “To create what it does, Hollywood has to draw young people, often of unstable temperment, from all over the world. It plunges them into exacting work—surrounds them with a sensuous life– and cuts them off from the normal sources of living”.”
― Max Lerner
22. “The piercing fanfare of the brass against the brutal boom and rattle of the drums surged through the air. At the head of the Ferris band marched the drum majorette. A crimson and white shako crowned her long dark hair which flew out behind her and across her radiant face flushed with excitement. Her blue eyes flashed and her smile registered triumph at having been chosen.”
― Clark Zlotchew
23. “Junior writers $300; Minor poets—$500 a week; Broken novelists—$850-1000; One play dramatists—$1500; Sucks—$2000. Wits—$2500.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald
24. “I know that there is a distinction between Black filmmakers and White filmmakers by Hollywood and by America as a whole. Black filmmakers have different obstacles, different markets, different expectations, different industry standards in expectations. (“The Making of Dual Mania: Filmmaking Chicago Style,” 2018)”
― Joseph Strickland
25. “This is the ending. This is the end to several different stories. There will be no bang to it. No cliffhanger. Everything has come to a close and I’m ready to fade out.”
― J.C. Wickhart
26. “Rejection and failure are the bread and butter of this gluten-free, nondairy town.”
― Nell Scovell
27. “Some guy once told me that “they can fix that in post.” I hear that they still haven’t found his body.”
― Unknown
28. “Only in the detached from reality world of goofy Hollywood and modern academia could a mass murderer like Che Guevara be turned into something of a cult celebrity.”
― Paul Kengor
29. “Barbara La Marr was one of the first movie stars, she came to
Hollywood at fifteen,” she says, still scratching. “She was smart, bubbly, impatient, and it all got out of hand. When she died, they called her the girl who was too beautiful to live.”
“So now I am doomed? Thanks for the pep talk. I needed that.”
― Simona Moroni
30. “After the introduction, Elki pointed at the palm trees. Ever seen something so stunning Please, I said, I hate those trees. They grow on and on. Keep going, with nothing sucking their strength like normal trees and their branches. Selfish bastards.Wow. Don’t trip. There.”
― Simona Moroni
31. “The American renaissance begins with the unified revolutionary act of turning off and smashing the television, rejecting Hollywood on all fronts and refusing to intellectually ingest the toxic force feed of the establishment minority’s matrix narrative.”
― James Scott
32. “Yes, I did promise you a role but your options are quickly narrowing. You’ve got a nice set of natural tits and a cute little tush; it’s time to reevaluate your attributes and consider your options.”
― J.C. Wickhart
33. “Hopefully, a new dawn will emerge where Sharon Tate is known and appreciated more for who she is and not what was done to her”
― Michael A. Walker
34. “She was born under the sign of Gemini. And that stands for the good and evil twin. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde both hiding and residing inside her heart. Her good twin was not bad at all. But her evil twin was even better, and showed up to be way too fatal!”
― Ana Claudia Antunes
35. “Those movies… ridiculously inaccurate. The real gods of Asgard — Thor, Loki, Odin, and the rest — are much more powerful, much more terrifying than anything Hollywood could concoct.”
― Rick Riordan
36. “I didn’t leave that crowd of ocelots to go back into it.” [when asked to write the film script for The Osterman Weekend]”
― Robert Ludlum
37. “It would appear that a lot of people out there are hiding their own dark, socially unacceptable sexual fantasies behind a facade of fake indignant outrage when someone else gets caught with their pants down.”
― Oliver Markus Malloy
38. “Hollywood is too busy trying to make old formulas hit the jackpot again to see the future. Hollywood is yesterday, forever catching up with what’s happening today. This will change only when it becomes financially profitable, and reality will never be profitable until society overcomes its fear and hatred of difference and begins to see that we’re all in this together”
― Vito Russo
39. “I’ve lived long enough to know that life doesn’t always stick to the rules…The perfectly impossible and absolutely ridiculous keep happening all the time.”
― Elizabeth Winder
40. “It’s when you feel worse, that’s when your character comes out and the last thing you want to do is quit.”
― Paul T. Scheuring
41. “Writing turns everybody into wussies. Everybody quits.”
― Paul T. Scheuring
42. “At the conclusion of Hollywood disaster movies and epics, time moves backward, piecing together like a jigsaw the elements that had come apart. The Titanic resumes its journey; Russell Crowe is reunited with his murdered wife and son. It’s not a happy ending; it’s a convention created for the purposes of an impossible sense of uplift at the end of death and tragedy: the happy beginning. Technology makes Hades unnecessary.”
― Amit Chaudhuri
43. “With prose, I know where I’m starting and I think I know where I’m going.”
― Paul T. Scheuring
44. “As a writer, you’re the guy in the box. You’re creating and you have these euphorias.”
― Paul T. Scheuring
45. “On Friday evening Martin and Mona went to the United Artists Theatre to see a film already being mentioned for the Academy award. It had three stars, ran a hundred and ten minutes, and bored them both to petrifaction. (In brief, the award was in the bag.)The Case of the Seven of Calvary”
― Anthony Boucher
46. “It’s a great euphoria when you reach that writing zone.”
― Paul T. Scheuring
47. “We could debate whether movies reflect or create the reality. It’s clear to me they do both.”
― alex tizon
48. “In the photo Vidor had taken during her Keystone Kops days, [Mabel Normand] had been smiling, as she always seemed to be doing, with her small feet pointed inwards, and her small fingers pointed outwards—the pose that made almost everyone who met her want to give her a great big bear hug.”
― Sidney K. Kirkpatrick
49. “Black is a very sentimental colour. You can hide any rubbish behind it. Hollywood flicks are fun, if your idea of a good time is a hamburger and a milk shake. America invented the movies so it would never need to grow up. We have angst, depression and middle-aged regret. They have Hollywood.”
― J.G. Ballard
50. “I had desired it with an ardor that far exceeded moderation, but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.”
― Mary Shelley
51. “There’s a story you write, there’s a story you shoot and there’s a story you cut.”
― Paul T. Scheuring
52. “The Hollywooden heads would buy a car for almost any purpose except a worthy one. Many automobiles were purchased to attract members of LA’s eight or ten opposite sexes. Since the denizens of America’s Gomorrah, were incapable of verbalizing any idea more complex than “box office gross,” the expensive car served as a substitute for witty come-on and seductive chat.”
― P.J. O’Rourke
53. “In the movies, God is an actor just like everyone else.”
― Kris Kidd
54. “It must have been marvelous when the century was young and things impressed themselves in such blatant vivid brilliance that an approaching fire under a starry sky could illuminate, even to a Crimean actress, this sense of “place” – that there was nothing to be wanted from material things, nothing to be saved.”
― Eve Babitz
55. “The Hollywood process is a living thing and you get used to that.”
― Paul T. Scheuring
56. “Analysis is about re-parenting yourself and relearning the habits of a lifetime.”
― Stephen Galloway
57. “In prose, when you wrote something, it’s symphonic… There’s something ethereal in that process that’s euphoric.”
― Paul T. Scheuring
58. “You had to stand in line to hate him.”
― Hedda Hopper
59. “The flirty old moon eased his way across the warped and sooty floorboards and kissed my bare toes, turning my feet as luminous as the skin of cinema stars.”
― Cat Winters
60. “Even the world’s greatest actor cannot fake an erection.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana
61. “If California is a state of mind, Hollywood is where you take its temperature. There is a peculiar sense in which this city existing mainly on film and tape is our national capital, alas, and not just the capital of California. It’s the place where our children learn how and what to dream and where everything happens just before, or just after, it happens to us.”
― Ross Macdonald
62. “And this, my friends, is how love f*cks up your life.”
― Beck Anderson
63. “It could have been worse. He could have said he wasn’t a ‘dessert person’ and then I would have been forced to jump out of a moving car.”
― Saba Kapur
64. “The cacophonous touch of fame to my sole reiterates why I came: not for fame but to remind that fate is unkind when your dreams only exist within the confines of a classic Disney rhyme.”
― j.d. tulloch
65. “I often wondered if the pursuit of the illicit was not tacitly encouraged among those in charge, devoted, as they all were, to profit. I could have been carrying on with a psychopathic serial murderer, and no one would have blinked an eye as long as I knew my lines and hit my mark with efficiency and a modicum of verve.”
― Kate Mulgrew
66. “Hollywood is wonderful. Anyone who doesn’t like it is either crazy or sober.”
― Raymond Chandler
67. “Power does not ask permission.Power does not take permission.Power does not need permission.”
― Amit Kalantri
68. “Quelles sont les probabilités de se perdre dans la campagne irlandaise sur un trajet de moins de dix kilomètres Très faibles.Cette probabilité devient nulle lorsqu’on s’arme d’un système de localisation dernière génération. Et pourtant je peux désormais dire que j’ai réussi cet exploit.”
― Elisia Blade
69. “Our lives were a series of extremes. A thanksgiving of riches was bestowed on us at birth: grace and joy and a fair share of beauty; privilege and power. Those blessings which luck had overlooked could be bought. We seemed to exist above the squalor of suffering as most people know it. We were envied. But there were also more expectations…”
― Brooke Hayward
70. “It’s all a game. And if you don’t want to play, maybe you shouldn’t come to Hollywood.”
― Sophie Kinsella
71. “The minute we moved in (1712 North Crescent Heights), Dennis Hopper decided to give a party for Andy (Warhol), who was coming out to Los Angeles, and he decided that the one thing that would really make the house stand out, fabulously, would be billboards. So he papered the downstairs bathrooms with billboards. He had also decided that the food at the party would be hot dogs and chili. So we had a hot-dog stand! And Dennis had found huge papier-mâché Mexican figures with firecrackers hanging on them.”
― Brooke Hayward
72. “Hollywood shines by virtue of light within.”
― A.D. Posey
73. “Out of perverseness, I jumped on the subway and went down to a sound stage on Fourth Street to watch the shooting of Kay Doubleday’s big strip scene in Mad Dog Coll, a gangster film that can still, to my embarrassment, be seen occasionally on late-night TV… Kay Doubleday was in my class at Lee Strasberg’s it was in the interest of art, I told myself, to watch her prance down a ramp, singing and stripping her heart out.”
― Brooke Hayward
74.“I wrote in a bedroom crowded with ghosts,” Brooke Hayward says. “My mother would disapprove, and my father would be horrified. The moral of my book is that you pay for everything. They were rich, accomplished, famous and beautiful. We were drowned in privilege, yet it ended in all this hideous tragedy.” (interview from People magazine (May 23, 1977)”
― Brooke Hayward
75. “Hollywood is bigger down right now by sequels, by the uninspired. Well, my M.O. is a two-hour feast for your senses. That means starting the concept of filmmaking from scratch, making it your own.”
― Lee Matthew Goldberg
76. “Why does Kubrick always chill our blood, and make us huddled up scared stiff with eyes wide shut? Because even dead he’s still “Shinnying” with his old hand and his eye-catching plots.”
― Ana Claudia Antunes
77. “Something good happens to you, and you let off a different energy that attracts other good things.”
― Candace Bushnell
78. “People are always telling women to lose weight, and then when they do, other women attack them for it.”
― Candace Bushnell
79. “Venice was a contrast from Los Angeles itself, where you might see a woman with $15,000 tits, a face frozen in place by Botox, wobbling with her $4,000 Gucci bag right past a child with a sunken belly and exposed ribs encaging a heart too weak to scream.”
― Jackie Haze
80. “There’s a big luscious peach of a dream in L.A. The peach has been repeatedly exposed as overripe and tainted with wormholes… but it’s still the only giant peach in town. Even if it’s wet-brown and crawling with centipedes, everyone wants their bite.”
― Cintra Wilson
81. “Welcome to Hollywood. Here you can be whatever you want! That’s the secret of American success! Fake it till you make it!”
― Lily Amis
82. “I wept for my family, all if us, my beautiful, idyllic, lost family. I wept for our excesses, our delusions and inconsistencies; not that we had cared too much or too little, although both were true, but that we had let such extraordinary care be subverted into extraordinary carelessness. We’d been careless with the best of our many resources: each other. It was as though we had taken for granted the fact that there would be more where we had come from too; another chance, another summer, another Brooke, Bridget or Bill.”
― Brooke Hayward
83. “One of the unexpected and wonderfully fair things I have learned in my career is that if Hollywood were filled just with perfect-looking people, then soap operas would be the most-watched things in the world. But they’re not. Looks are great, but they’re not compelling enough. I’ve noticed that successful actors with long careers are usually talented actors with charismatic screen presences, and all of them exude one thing: confidence.”
― Mindy Kaling
84. “What Mayer did in the thirties― what he was situated to do as a Jew yearning to belong― was provide reassurance against the anxieties and disruptions of the time. He did this by fashioning a vast, compelling national fantasy out of his dreams and out of the basic tenets of his own dogmatic faith― a belief in virtue, in the bulwark of family, in the merits of loyalty, in the soundness of tradition, in America itself.”
― Neal Gabler
85. “They say you can fool some of the people all of the time. Accordingly, I think we should concentrate on this group initially. We can move on to the people you can only fool some of the time at a later date if we deem it necessary.”
― Stephen Mitchell
86. “You are better than any hollywood star. Just love yourself…!!!”
― M.Rehan Behleem
87. “Recognizing that the movie business was the entertainment business that wasn’t moving fast enough to fill my creative and financial coffers was an impetus to grow, and that has taken me and so many of my colleagues into a larger world.”
― Lynda Obst
88. “Hollywood Expressed his inner Godzilla again” V to Z”
― J.R. Ward
89. “…as if Hollywood were the name of the enchanted forest where you loose yourself and find yourself, again; the wood that changes you; the wood where you go mad; the wood where the shadows life longer than you do.”
― Angela Carter
90. “Artist Matthew Barney has made a film about “shit”. It is hardly original. Hollywood has made shit films for decades.”
― Dean Cavanagh
91. “When it comes to bending the truth to assist a story’s plot versus staying completely true to the facts, we can assure you any dramatist will always select the former. Mark Twain’s old saying “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story” still reigns in Hollywood.”
― James Morcan
92. “Bad tastecreates many more millionaires than good taste. It finally boiled down to a matter of who got the most votes. In the land of the moles a mole was king”
― Charles Bukowsk
93. “The difference between extras and audience members is that audience members don’t get chairs. Audience members are the daylaborers of the industry. When it’s sunny, we stand in the sun. When it’s cold, we stand in the cold.”
― J. Richard Singleton
94. “Why is is that all people in Hollywood think, oh short, black and tattoos, ohhh he’s in the music industry? No motherfucker, I’m an Author.”
― Slicktor Victor Robinson
95. “But the truth is, the star was just on the sidewalk. Where people walk right over it.”
― Ava Dellaira
96. “the casting had been typically Hollywood: they didn’t look or act a bit alike.”
― Thomas Pynchon
97. “Lord, that Hollywood train, forever coming round the bend!”
― James Baldwin
98. “The measuring stick of success in Hollywood is covered in shit at both ends”
― Dean Cavanagh
99. “The Hollywood love always stays in the Hollywood; it never comes home, unless you bring the Hollywood home.”
― M.F. Moonzajer
100. “If there is one Christian left who holds out hope that a God honoring, biblically accurate, mainstream Hollywood movie will emerge, I have some advice for you…stop waiting, it’s not going to happen, move on. If you want authentic Scripture, read the Scripture.”
― William Branks
101. “I Love LA, It has Beautiful Weather, Beautiful Women and Beautiful Weed; the three W’s you need.”
― Slicktor Victor Robinson