Motivational Quotes

Hollywood

The overall picture, as the boys say, is of a degraded community whose idealism even is largely fake. The pretentiousness, the bogus enthusiasm, the constant drinking, the incessant squabbling over money, the all-pervasive agent, the strutting of the big shots (and their usually utter incompetence to achieve anything they start out to do), the constant fear of losing all this fairy gold and being the nothing they have never ceased to be, the snide tricks, the whole damn mess is out of this world.

- Chandler, Raymond

Best Quotes about Hollywood

Fame is no sanctuary from the passing of youth... suicide is much easier and more acceptable in Hollywood than growing old gracefully.

Burchill, Julie

You write a book like that you're fond of over the years, then you see that happen to it, it's like pissing in your father's beer.

Hemingway, Ernest

Chandler, Raymond

You can't find any true closeness in Hollywood, because everybody does the fake closeness so well.

Carrie Fisher

I devoutly believe it is the writer who has matured the film medium more than anyone else in Hollywood. Even when he knew nothing about his work, he brought at least knowledge of life and a more grown-up mind, a maturer feeling about the human being.

Nichols, Dudley

I hate the place like poison with a sincere hatred.

Hollywood gives a young girl the aura of one giant, self-contained orgy farm, its inhabitants dedicated to crawling into every pair of pants they can find.

Lake, Veronica

Just like those other black holes from outer space, Hollywood is postmodern to this extent: it has no center, only a spreading dead zone of exhaustion, inertia, and brilliant decay.

Kroker, Arthur

Where is Hollywood located? Chiefly between the ears. In that part of the American brain lately vacated by God.

Jong, Erica

10.

If you have a vagina and an attitude in this town, then that's a lethal combination.

Stone, Sharon

11.

Hollywood has gone from Pola to Polaroid.

Negri, Pola

12.

The only reason I'm in Hollywood is that I don't have the moral courage to refuse the money.

Brando, Marlon

13.

It feels like a barbell. [When asked what she thought of her newly acquired Oscar statuette]

Tomei, Marisa

14.

Strip away the phony tinsel of Hollywood and you will find the real tinsel underneath.

Levant, Oscar

15.

They don't want you until you have made a name, and by the time you have made a name, you have developed some kind of talent they can't use. All they will do is spoil it, if you let them.

Chandler, Raymond

16.

Hollywood held this double lure for me, tremendous sums of money for work that required no more effort than a game of pinochle.

Hecht, Ben

17.

Hollywood money isn't money. It's congealed snow, melts in your hand, and there you are.

Parker, Dorothy

18.

Some are able and humane men and some are low-grade individuals with the morals of a goat, the artistic integrity of a slot machine, and the manners of a floorwalker with delusions of grandeur.

Chandler, Raymond

19.

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.

Hepburn, Katharine

20.

Isn't Hollywood a dump -- in the human sense of the word. A hideous town, pointed up by the insulting gardens of its rich, full of the human spirit at a new low of debasement.

21.

I hate a man who always says yes to me. When I say no I like a man who also says no.

Goldwyn, Samuel

22.

Hollywood has always been a cage... a cage to catch our dreams.

Huston, John

23.

Bankers, nepotists, contracts and talkies: on four fingers one may count the leeches which have sucked a young and vigorous industry into paresis.

Trumbo, Dalton

24.

I can't talk about Hollywood. It was a horror to me when I was there and it's a horror to look back on. I can't imagine how I did it. When I got away from it I couldn't even refer to the place by name. Out there, I called it.

Parker, Dorothy

25.

That's one thing I like about Hollywood. The writer is there revealed in his ultimate corruption. He asks no praise, because his praise comes to him in the form of a salary check. In Hollywood the average writer is not young, not honest, not brave, and a bit overdressed. But he is darn good company, which book writers as a rule are not. He is better than what he writes. Most book writers are not as good.

Chandler, Raymond

26.

Hollywood's like Egypt, full of crumbled pyramids. It'll never come back. It'll just keep on crumbling until finally the wind blows the last studio prop across the sands.

Selznick, David O.

27.

There rise her timeless capitals of empires daily born, whose plinths are laid at midnight and whose streets are packed at morn; and here come tired youths and maids that feign to love or sin in tones like rusty razor blades to tunes like smitten tin.

Kipling, Rudyard

28.

To survive there, you need the ambition of a Latin-American revolutionary, the ego of a grand opera tenor, and the physical stamina of a cow pony.

Burke, Billie

29.

You don't resign from these jobs, you escape from them.

Steel, Dawn

30.

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.

Chandler, Raymond

31.

Its idea of production value is spending a million dollars dressing up a story that any good writer would throw away. Its vision of the rewarding movie is a vehicle for some glamour-puss with two expressions and eighteen changes of costume, or for some male idol of the muddled millions with a permanent hangover, six worn-out acting tricks, the build of a lifeguard, and the mentality of a chicken-strangler.

Chandler, Raymond

32.

Hollywood's a very weird place. I think there's less of everything except for attitude.

Cain, Dean

33.

If New York is the Big Apple, tonight Hollywood is the Big Nipple.

Bertolucci, Bernardo

34.

Hollywood is a place that attracts people with massive holes in their souls.

Phillips, Julia

35.

It's a mining town in lotus land.

36.

The sumptuous age of stars and images is reduced to a few artificial tornado effects, pathetic fake buildings, and childish tricks which the crowd pretends to be taken in by to avoid feeling too disappointed. Ghost towns, ghost people. The whole place has the same air of obsolescence about it as Sunset or Hollywood Boulevard.

Baudrillard, Jean

37.

If it's a good script I'll do it. And if it's a bad script, and they pay me enough, I'll do it.

Burns, George

38.

In Hollywood if you don't have happiness you send out for it.

Reed, Rex

39.

We Americans have always considered Hollywood, at best, a sinkhole of depraved venality. And, of course, it is. It is not a Protective Monastery of Aesthetic Truth. It is a place where everything is incredibly expensive.

Mamet, David

40.

Hollywood makes prostitutes out of women and sissies out of men.

41.

You can take all the sincerity in Hollywood, place it in the navel of a firefly and still have room enough for three caraway seeds and a producer's heart.

Fred Allen

42.

The motion picture made in Hollywood, if it is to create art at all, must do so within such strangling limitations of subject and treatment that it is a blind wonder it ever achieves any distinction beyond the purely mechanical slickness of a glass and chromium bathroom.

Chandler, Raymond

43.

Hollywood is a place where they'll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your soul.

Marilyn Monroe

44.

My attitude about Hollywood is that I wouldn't walk across the street to pull one of those executives out of the snow if he was bleeding to death. Not unless I was paid for it. None of them ever did me any favors.

Woods, James

45.

I went out there for a thousand a week, and I worked Monday, and I got fired Wednesday. The guy that hired me was out of town Tuesday.

Algren, Nelson

46.

In Beverly Hills... they don't throw their garbage away. They make it into television shows.

Allen, Woody

47.

An associate producer is the only guy in Hollywood who will associate with a producer.

Allen, Fred A.

48.

Hollywood is a place where people from Iowa mistake each other for stars.

Fred Allen

49.

Behind the phony tinsel of Hollywood lies the real tinsel.

Oscar Levant

50.

Studio executives are intelligent, brutally overworked men and women who share one thing in common with baseball managers: they wake up every morning of the world with the knowledge that sooner or later they're going to get fired.

Goldman, William