101 Funny & Fantastic Quotes About Los Angeles

Los Angeles… you either love it or hate it.

The views are beautiful; the traffic, maddening. The nature is beautiful; the smog, grim. The city is unending and expansive; getting around it, though, is another story.

It’s a place that’s hard not to have conflicting feelings about, and this collection of quotes about Los Angeles does just that.

I’ve collected Los Angeles quotes from famous actresses and actors, singers, comedians, writers, and famous people of all stripes to summarize the city’s perks and peeves, from LA quotes full of love for the city to funny burns about Los Angeles.

So, wherever you stand on LA: love it, hate it, or somehow manage to exist somewhere in between like I do, I hope you’ll find at least one quote about LA that resonates with you.

Short Quotes about Los Angeles

“I wouldn’t leave L.A. if the whole place tipped over into the ocean.” ― Eve Babitz

“Los Angeles is 72 suburbs in search of a city.” — Dorothy Parker

“In Los Angeles, everyone is a star.” — Denzel Washington

“I do actually like Los Angeles. Partly because I was told I wouldn’t.” — Hugh Laurie

“When I came to Los Angeles, it was the first time that I ever felt like I belong somewhere.” — Jennifer Love Hewitt

“Los Angeles is many places in one place.” — P. J. O’Rourke

“I love Los Angeles. It reinvents itself every 2 days.” — Billy Connolly

“I love living in Los Angeles.” — William Shatner

“Los Angeles is a city looking for a ritual to join its fragments.” — Jim Morrison

“Everything moves a little quicker in Los Angeles.” — Kyle Chandler

“I love Los Angeles. I love Hollywood. They’re beautiful. Everybody’s plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic.” — Andy Warhol

“There’s always – somehow a red carpet everywhere. And I think that, you know, it’s a fantasyland out here, you know. It’s beautiful. It’s sunny all the time. You know, there are beautiful people everywhere because you’re not allowed to cross the Los Angeles city lines unless you’re beautiful or skinny.” — Debra Messing

“You can have a laugh in Los Angeles, or you can weep in Los Angeles, depending on your attitude towards it.” — Miranda Richardson

“In Los Angeles, I feel like the ugly duckling, like I’m from Venus or something.” — Eva Green

“Los Angeles is like a beauty parlor at the end of the universe.” — Emily Mortimer

“Los Angeles is a microcosm of the United States. If L.A. falls, the country falls.” — Ice T.

“The best of that So Cal feeling really was something you wished you could bottle.” ― Philip Wyeth

“You’re not done with L.A. until L.A. is done with you.” ― Philip Elliott

“Los Angeles, you’ve got to be more than the sum of your hats.” ― Dan Johnson

“Tip the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles.” — Frank Lloyd Wright

“Los Angeles survives on that which is unpredictable. The unexpected courses through its very veins.” — Ellie Kemper

“This is Los Angeles. There’s always an alternate route.” ― David Kipen

“Los Angeles was built as a machine of transformation.” ― Dan Johnson

“The final story, the final chapter of Western man, I believe, lies in Los Angeles.” — Phil Ochs

“If you spend any time in Los Angeles, there’s only one topic of conversation.” — Alan Rickman

General Los Angeles Quotes

“People cut themselves off from their ties of their old life when they come to Los Angeles. They are looking for a place where they can be free, where they can do things they couldn’t do anywhere else.” ― Tom Bradley

“I really do feel like Los Angeles is my home now and, as cliche as this sounds, I felt like I found myself here and I really know who I am now. There was a long period like I was drifting or floating through life, and now I feel like I have a definitive target – and future.” ― Ryan Kwanten

“An afternoon drive from Los Angeles will take you up into the high mountains, where eagles circle above the forests and the cold blue lakes, or out over the Mojave Desert, with its weird vegetation and immense vistas. Not very far away are Death Valley, and Yosemite, and Sequoia Forest with its giant trees which were growing long before the Parthenon was built.” ― Christopher Isherwood

“I really love Los Angeles! The diversity here! You have people from all walks of life. And there’s so much zeal for life and passion and creativity and those are the sort of things I wanted to be around.” — Russell Okung

“As far as loneliness, I feel Los Angeles and its layout, having to drive everywhere – it is a lonely place. It’s an isolated city in that respect because you’re driving to places alone listening to the radio.” — Jason Schwartzman

“Los Angeles is such a town of show business, and I’m a terrible celebrity. I find it difficult – it’s the beast that must be fed. There’s this big wheel of pictures and articles that goes around, and you get pinned on it.” — Julia Roberts

“Sometimes, I wonder what I’m doing back in Los Angeles, but when you look out there… How can you complain when you see a whale cresting, matter-of-factly, as you make your breakfast?” — Val Kilmer

“I grew up with such mixed feelings about LA, but I do love it. I grew up lectured by Woody Allen, for example, that LA was absurd, worthy of ridicule and contempt. Most people seem to describe Los Angeles as elementally despicable, or as someplace that requires an apology.” — Matthew Specktor

“Los Angeles was the kind of place where everybody was from somewhere else and nobody really dropped anchor. It was a transient place. People drawn by the dream, people running from the nightmare. Twelve million people and all of them ready to make a break for it if necessary. Figuratively, literally, metaphorically — any way you want to look at it — everybody in L.A. keeps a bag packed. Just in case.” — Michael Connelly

“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.” — Mary McCormack

“Los Angeles is a place where if you have the right person with you, there are all these little worlds that you would never guess by just looking at the exterior of what the city is.” — Greta Gerwig

“The city has a reputation for constant sunshine and warmth, but once the sun is down at night, LA remembers it’s secretly a desert under its newer identity. The cool night air doesn’t care what midday was like.” ― Amy Spalding

“People don’t seem to have a problem with a romanticized New York, in fact that’s almost all they ever do, in some sense, is romanticize that place. Los Angeles deserves the same courtesy.” ― Matthew Specktor

“If most American cities are about the consumption of culture, Los Angeles and New York are about the production of culture – not only national culture but global culture.” ― Barbara Kruger

“The setting sun burned the sky pink and orange in the same bright hues as surfers’ bathing suits. It was beautiful deception… Sunsets did that here. Made you forget it was the smog that made their colors so brilliant, that behind every pretty picture there could be an ugly story.” ― Michael Connelly

“Los Angeles is the City of Dreams, the City of Angels, a city blessed and cursed with a glorious dream and façade of hopes — glitter sprinkled on top if its sprawling expanse. It is a city without a center, a city with a rich and fabled past often bestowed with nostalgic memories not entirely based on fact; an erasure of memory.” — Gloria Álvarez

“I just feel like growing up in Los Angeles, you learn, ‘Well you’re never gonna be the prettiest girl in the room, so just don’t even try.’ I mean, I care about being pretty, but it’s not my most valued thing.” ― Zooey Deschanel

“Darling, in LA, you decide who you are. Every neighborhood has its own culture and population. Once you find the right one for you, you’re home. Los Angeles is a way of life.” ― Cara Dee

“A good part of any day in Los Angeles is spent driving, alone, through streets devoid of meaning to the driver, which is one reason the place exhilarates some people, and floods others with an amorphous unease.” ― Joan Didion

“There are times when Los Angeles is the most magical city on Earth. When the Santa Ana winds sweep through and the air is warm and so, so clear. When the jacaranda trees bloom in the most brilliant lilac violet. When the ocean sparkles on a warm February day and you’re pushing fine grains of sand through your bare toes while the rest of the country is hunkered down under blankets slurping soup.” ― Steven Rowley

Digs and Funny Quotes About Los Angeles

“Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic.” — Norman Mailer

“See, that’s the thing about L.A.— When you’ve mastered the art of feeling lonely in a room full of people, that’s when you know.” ― Kris Kidd

“Anyone living in Los Angeles who has opposable thumbs is required to write a screenplay.” — James Scott Bell

“Perhaps there is no life after death….there’s just Los Angeles.” ― Richard Anderson

“In Los Angeles, everything is 100% organic, except the people.” ― Kris Kidd

“He’s probably one of the few people that have survived Los Angeles as a human being.” — Nick Tosches

“I’m so glad to be back in New York. Los Angeles can be so cold, so cruel after you’ve been-what’s the word?-oh yes: ‘fired.'” ― Bette Midler

“I’m affected by my environment. Los Angeles makes me defensive and wary.” ― Dan Fogelberg

“When you see the Escalades and the Hummers driving down the street, at least in Los Angeles, this dry, flat desert with shopping malls, when you see someone driving one of those through this you’re like, ‘You are definitely part of the problem.'” ― Henry Rollins

“I’ve always thought of Las Vegas as Los Angeles on its day off. There’s not any hierarchy of taste, and that’s what L.A. always was to me: It’s not really a town of culture, it’s a town of entertainment.” ― James Turrell

“Los Angeles had no culture of its own, just a large collection of misreadings of the artistic histories of other, proper cities.” ― Warren Ellis

“Los Angeles is a city made up of refugees from better cities.” ― J. Richard Singleton

“Isn’t it nice that people who prefer Los Angeles to San Francisco live there?” ― Herb Caen

“Los Angeles, I don’t like that town. Too decadent, and it’s slimy.” ― Layne Staley

“I do love America. And LA is a very short commute to America; it’s like half an hour on the plane.” — Craig Ferguson

“Many of my friends back in New York and elsewhere have a glib or dismissive attitude toward Los Angeles. It’s a place of strip malls and traffic and not much else, in their opinion.” ― Moby

“In Los Angeles, one laughs to survive, enjoys oneself not to enhance life but in order to live at all. That society is so vaporous and tenuous that the only alternative to a spiral of loneliness and fear is a self-contained, steady, pleasurably focused attitude. The L.A. cogito: I laugh, therefore I am.” — Peter Schjeldahl

“Los Angeles has no seasons, so it’s kind of hard to keep track of time here. The lines between spring, summer, fall, and winter all blur like my vision. I get stuck on repeat for different measures of eternity.” — Kris Kidd

“A tuna steak and a salad? Seventy bucks. Welcome to Los Angeles.” — Mark Zupan

“We live in Los Angeles, where you are expected to move every two to four years, so people can see how well your career is going.” — Rita Rudner

“I soon learned that my dad wasn’t totally off base when he said, ‘Los Angeles is like San Diego’s older, uglier sister that has herpes…. Also, how do I get back to I-5?’” — Justin Halpern

“In Washington, the first thing people tell you is what their job is. In Los Angeles you learn their star sign. In Houston you’re told how rich they are. And in New York they tell you what their rent is.” — Simon Hoggart

“I can’t do Los Angeles. I’ve always been the anti-Barbie. I don’t want to be in a place where almost every woman walks around with puffy lips, little noses and breasts large enough to nourish a small country.” — Vera Farmiga

“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

“I read the Life magazine articles about free love and free dope in California. At age 20 I drove to Los Angeles.” — Glenn Frey

“In Los Angeles, it’s like they jog for two hours a day and then they think they’re morally right. That’s when you want to choke people, you know?” — Liam Neeson

“Los Angeles gives one the feeling of the future more strongly than any city I know of. A bad future, too, like something out of Fritz Lang’s feeble imagination.” — Henry Miller

“When its 100 degrees in New York, it’s 72 in Los Angeles. When its 30 degrees in New York, in Los Angeles it’s still 72. However, there are 6 million interesting people in New York, and only 72 in Los Angeles.” — Neil Simon

“I don’t like Los Angeles. The people are awful and terribly shallow, and everybody wants to be famous but nobody wants to play the game. I’m from New York. I will kill to get what I need.” — Lady Gaga

“I would fly to Los Angeles just for a cheeseburger with pickles and extra tomatoes from In-N-Out.” — Zoe Kravitz

“[Los Angeles]: a city with all the personality of a paper cup.” — Raymond Chandler

“Marriages that last are with people who do not live in Los Angeles.” — Farrah Fawcett

“Los Angeles is a large city-like area surrounding the Beverly Hills Hotel.” — Fran Lebowitz

“You know, you’re really nobody in LA unless you live in a house with a really big door.” — Steve Martin

 “LA is the loneliest and most brutal of American cities; New York gets godawful cold in the winter but there’s a feeling of wacky comradeship somewhere in some streets. LA is a jungle.” – Jack Kerouac

“In San Francisco, vulgarity, “bad taste,” ostentation are regarded as a kind of alien blight, an invasion or encroachment from outside. In Los Angeles, there is so much money and power connected with ostentation that is no longer ludicrous: it commands a kind of respect.” — Pauline Kael

“In Los Angeles, people dress with the deep and earnest hope that people will do nothing but stare at them.” — Ellie Kemper

“[Los Angeles] is in love with its limitless horizontality, as New York may be with its verticality.” — Jean Baudrillard

“There are two modes of transport in Los Angeles: car and ambulance. Visitors who wish to remain inconspicuous are advised to choose the latter” — Fran Lebowitz

“The entrance to the Underworld is in Los Angeles.” ― Rick Riordan

“Los Angeles is a Yukon for crime-story writers.” ― Christina Stead

“I was voted the most beautiful girl in the world in 1958, and courted by every young, available man in Los Angeles, most of whom I didn’t go out with, by the way.” ― Joan Collins

“Pick your enemies carefully or you’ll never make it in Los Angeles.” ― Rona Barrett

“My problem with L. A. was that I could see the air I was breathing.” ― Frederick Lenz

“If New York is the city that never sleeps, then Los Angeles is the city that’s always passed out on the couch.” ― Paul Beatty

“In Los Angeles, by the time you’re 35, you’re older than most of the buildings.” ―Delia Ephron

“Los Angeles is a very transient town. It’s the only place I know where you can actually rent a dog.” ― Rita Rudner

“Once every hundred years, the Los Angeles smog rolls away for a single night, leaving the air as clean as interstellar space. That way the gods can see if Los Angeles is still there. If it is, they roll the smog back so they won’t have to look at it.” ― Larry Niven

“I’d move to Los Angeles if New Zealand and Australia were swallowed up by a tidal wave, if there was a bubonic plague in England and if the continent of Africa disappeared from some Martian attack.” ― Russell Crowe

“A great many people in Los Angeles are on special diets that restrict their intake of synthetic foods. The reason for this appears to be a widely held belief that organically grown fruits and vegetables make the cocaine work faster.” ― Fran Lebowitz

“I think the paparazzi might have chased me out of Los Angeles.” ― Nicolas Cage

“When I arrive in Los Angeles in the entertainment community, and I use implements like a shovel and a hammer, our society has distanced itself so far from working with its hands that those incredibly pedestrian skills are perceived as somehow being extraordinary.” ― Nick Offerman

“I’ve been told that I’m incompetent, socially re****ed, maladjusted. I still know that I couldn’t function in reality. Los Angeles is a good place for me.” ― Diablo Cody

“If, while watching the sun set on a used-car lot in Los Angeles, you are struck by the parallels between this image and the inevitable fate of humanity, do not, under any circumstances, write it down.” ― Fran Lebowitz

“The first thing you notice about L.A. is that it’s overflowing with people, tourists, the homeless, the starstruck, it was like an old fashioned boom town, a few ghosts wandered it’s streets but it was still booming, if L.A. lived off the people that were successful, the city would be awfully empty.” ― Jim Cherry

“Los Angeles makes the rest of California seem authentic.” – Jonathan Culler

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