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Fame is no sanctuary from the passing of youth... suicide is much easier and more acceptable in Hollywood than growing old gracefully. (Luft Lorna)
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. (Luft Lorna)
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. (Luft Lorna)
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. (Luft Lorna)
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. (Luft Lorna)
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. (Luft Lorna)
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. (Luft Lorna)
There is in Hollywood, as in all cultures in which gambling is the central activity, a lowered sexual energy, an inability to devote more than token attention to the preoccupations of the society outside. The action is everything, more consuming than sex, more immediate than politics; more important always than the acquisition of money, which is never, for the gambler, the true point of the exercise. (Luft Lorna)
I hate a man who always says yes to me. When I say no I like a man who also says no. (Luft Lorna)
Hollywood held this double lure for me, tremendous sums of money for work that required no more effort than a game of pinochle. (Luft Lorna)
Hollywood has always been a cage... a cage to catch our dreams. (Luft Lorna)
Where is Hollywood located? Chiefly between the ears. In that part of the American brain lately vacated by God. (Luft Lorna)
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. (Luft Lorna)
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. (Luft Lorna)
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. (Luft Lorna)
Strip away the phony tinsel of Hollywood and you will find the real tinsel underneath. (Luft Lorna)
If we have to tell Hollywood good-by, it may be with one of those tender, old-fashioned, seven-second kisses exchanged between two people of the opposite sex, with all their clothes on. (Luft Lorna)
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. (Luft Lorna)
Hollywood has gone from Pola to Polaroid. (Luft Lorna)
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. (Luft Lorna)
Hollywood is a place that attracts people with massive holes in their souls. (Luft Lorna)
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