Quotes on Hollywood

Hollywood is a strange place if you're in trouble. Everybody thinks it's contagious.

Much more frequent in Hollywood than the emergence of Cinderella is her sudden vanishing. At our party, even in those glowing days, the clock was always striking twelve for someone at the height of greatness; and there was never a prince to fetch her back to the happy scene.

I'm an actor, not a star. Stars are people who live in Hollywood and have heart-shaped swimming pools.

I never expected to become a director. It never occurred to me to come to America, to Hollywood. It's all been a wonderful accident. I'm still amazed every time I finish a film.

Even after I became involved in theater and involved in TV and film, I had this sort of idea that Hollywood was off limits. There was something about L.A., the mystique of it and fear of it.

Growing up female in America. What a liability! You grew up with your ears full of cosmetic ads, love songs, advice columns, whoreoscopes, Hollywood gossip, and moral dilemmas on the level of TV soap operas. What litanies the advertisers of the good life chanted at you! What curious catechisms!

Working in Hollywood does give one a certain expertise in the field of prostitution.

Hollywood is difficult to navigate if you have integrity, so I opted not to work if there wasn't enough to do in a role, which doesn't have to do with the role's size.

Its big men are mostly little men with fancy offices and a lot of money. A great many of them are stupid little men, with reach-me-down brains, small-town arrogance and a sort of animal knack of smelling out the taste of the stupidest part of the public. They have played in luck so long that they have come to mistake luck for enlightenment." - on Hollywood

Every year, Hollywood is looking for that new, white leading man and new white starlet that audiences fall in love with. But they're not looking for the next Denzel Washington, Will Smith or Sidney Poitier.

I don't have no story. Everybody wants this Hollywood story, but the world don't owe you nothing, man. It's what you owe the world.

In Hollywood, 'under development' means 'all I have is the title.'

The goal wasn't to be a millionaire or to be a Hollywood star. That was not the goal. The goal was something about - the goal was to find the goal, but I knew where it was.

There's really no precedent for someone like me gaining clout in the space that I'm in - a black woman directing films in Hollywood.

There's no doubt I was a bit of a misfit in the Hollywood of the forties. The race for glamour left me far behind. I didn't really want to keep up. I wanted my stardom without the usual trimmings. Because of this, I was branded a rebel at the very least. But I don't regret that for a minute. My appetite was my own and I simply wouldn't have it any other way.

A couple of years after I arrived in Hollywood, everything that was Latino was fashionable, and years after, my thought is that we're not fashionable anymore. We're here to stay.

Hubbard set up the Church of Scientology in Hollywood in 1954 for a reason. He understood that celebrity was increasingly a feature of American public life, and celebrities themselves were going to be worshiped as minor deities were in the ancient world. The idea was: if you could get them, think how many people would follow.

You know, when I first went into the movies Lionel Barrymore played my grandfather. Later he played my father and finally he played my husband. If he had lived I'm sure I would have played his mother. That's the way it is in Hollywood. The men get younger and the women get older.

It's funny: I've always had the analogy of a snow globe, that Hollywood is a snow globe. No, it's true. If you shake it up, you can look at it and really enjoy it. But don't ever go in. Don't ever buy into it and be like, 'I deserve all of this!' because it can go away at any time, so just have a lot of fun.

For American filmmakers, the Oscars is like a mystic thing. For me, it was being in a mirror of my dreams when I was dreaming of Hollywood when I was an adolescent.

The impact of the black audience is expressing itself. They look to films to be more expressive of their needs, their lives. Hollywood has gotten that message - finally.