Los Angeles is a city that takes up a lot of space — both physically and metaphorically.
It’s synonymous with California for many, Hollywood looming large in people’s minds when they think of Los Angeles.
But Los Angeles — or L.A., or La La Land, or the City of Angels, or whatever you choose to call it — has an identity beyond its celebrity-studded streets, expensive shops, and Hollywood business.
Here are a few quotes about Los Angeles — some funny, some beautiful, some slightly negative (I couldn’t help including them — I’m a Northern Californian who enjoys every chance to stoke our rivalry!) — to help you find words for this curious and beautiful California city.
Beautiful & Funny Quotes about Los Angeles
“When I came to Los Angeles, it was the first time that I ever felt like I belong somewhere.”
— Jennifer Love Hewitt
“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
“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; they are the oldest living things in the world. One should visit such places often, and be conscious, in the midst of the city, of their surrounding presence. For this is the real nature of California and the secret of its fascination; this untamed, undomesticated, aloof, prehistoric landscape which relentlessly reminds the traveller of his human condition and the circumstances of his tenure upon the earth.
― Christopher Isherwood
“In Los Angeles, everyone is a star.”
– Denzel Washington
“Los Angeles is like a beauty parlor at the end of the universe.”
— Emily Mortimer
“Los Angeles is 72 suburbs in search of a city.”
— Dorothy Parker
“I love Los Angeles. It reinvents itself every 2 days.”
–Billy Connolly
“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 Hollywood. They’re beautiful. Everybody’s plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic.”
— Andy Warhol
“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
“I wouldn’t leave L.A. if the whole place tipped over into the ocean.”
― Eve Babitz
“The setting sun burned the sky pink and orange in the same bright hues as surfers’ bathing suits. It was beautiful deception, Bosch thought, as he drove north on the Hollywood Freeway to home. 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
“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
“This is Los Angeles. There’s always an alternate route.”
― David Kipen
“Los Angeles was built as a machine of transformation.”
― Dan Johnson
“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
“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. But other times, like when the jacaranda trees drop their blossoms in an eerie purple rain, Los Angeles feels like only a half-formed dream. Like perhaps the city was founded as a strip mall in the early 1970s and has no real reason to exist. An afterthought from the designer of some other, better city. A playground made only for attractive people to eat expensive salads.”
― Steven Rowley
Funny Quotes, Digs, and Jokes 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
“In Los Angeles, everything is 100% organic, except the people.”
― Kris Kidd
“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
“I do love America. And LA is a very short commute to America; it’s like half an hour on the plane.”
– Craig Ferguson
“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 Kudd
“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
“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
“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
“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 Los Angeles, people dress with the deep and earnest hope that people will do nothing but stare at them.”
–Ellie Kemper
“Los Angeles makes the rest of California seem authentic.”
– Jonathan Culler
“The entrance to the Underworld is in Los Angeles.”
― Rick Riordan
“In Los Angeles, by the time you’re 35, you’re older than most of the buildings.”
–Delia Ephron
“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
Breezy Los Angeles Instagram Captions
Those quotes all a little too harsh and/or literary for your LA Instagram caption?
I’ve got a few kinder quotes, sayings, and phrases about LA that are perfect for a Los Angeles Instagram caption!
In a golden state of mind
California dreamin’
They don’t call it the Best Coast for nothing
California girls, we’re unforgettable!
Nothing comes close to the golden coast
Welcome to the Hotel California!
Allison Green is a former teacher who has been travel blogging since 2016. She has a Masters in Teaching and a B.A. in English and Creative Writing. Her blog posts merge her background as an educator with her experience traveling to 70+ countries to encourage ethical, meaningful travel. She has been a speaker at the World Travel Writers Conference and her writing, photography, and podcasting work has appeared in National Geographic, CNN Arabic, CBC Canada, and Forbes, amongst others. Now a full-time traveler, she has lived in Prague, Sofia, New York City, and the San Francisco Bay Area.