Hollywood people want to build you up and make you famous only to knock you off you're the pedestal they built for you.

Practically everyone in Hollywood has a neighbor who's been famous, wants to be famous, is famous, has been married to someone famous, worked with someone famous, slept with someone famous, been blackmailed by someone famous.

I've never dated anyone in Hollywood - or anyone famous, for that matter. I don't know that I'm ever gonna write a song that you will know who it's about.

Few if any teenagers can relate to getting up for school and finding famous comics like Pryor and Williams hanging out in your living room after a hard night of partying. But that's Hollywood.

It is a very proud moment for our entire family that a movie has been made on our lives and we have taken a small village of Haryana to Hollywood.

For me, my family and my faith have been what's really been my anchor, and grounding me, and helping me navigate through a lot of the things that really destroy marriages in Hollywood, and in your own personal integrity.

Hollywood, we get it. The Christian faith just doesn't work for you 'in the long run.' However, for a large percentage of this country (the same country that makes your movies millions of dollars), it does. So please, for all of our sakes, keep your 'beliefs to yourself' and just 'stop the hate.'

You get so afraid of failure and so afraid of losing and so afraid of not being the best that it's not a natural drive - it's born out of fear of failure. Which helps in Hollywood.

I mean, I love L.A. - I love living here. But I wish that we could make things without the need to hit a home run every single time. It's a unique thing to Hollywood that if you don't do that every time, then you're considered a failure. But it's like, 'Well, are you making movies to be successful? Or are you making movies to learn something?'

There is no middle ground in Hollywood; you're a failure or you're a success. That mentality is wild.

Hollywood... a city I was to come back to time and again, in sickness and in health, in success and in failure, with anticipation and with dread.

At the outset, I want to say that the suggestion that the struggle in South Africa is under the influence of foreigners or communists is wholly incorrect. I have done whatever I did because of my experience in South Africa and my own proudly felt African background, and not because of what any outsider might have said.

It's good to experience Hollywood in short bursts, I guess. Little snippets. I don't think I can handle being here all the time, it's pretty nutty.

If women choose guerilla style filmmaking or new media productions, etc., all power to them. But if they're there because 'Big Hollywood' won't let them in, then we're moving further and further away from equality.

It's tougher for women than men in Hollywood, period, if you ask me. As with most professions, women have generally not found equality with men when it comes to income and influence. There aren't as many female directors, producers, and writers, which translates to fewer complex roles for women.

In Hollywood, all of your dreams can come true.

Hollywood is the dream factory, and no one dreams about older women.

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.

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

Dreams are the foundation of Hollywood. And dreams are the foundation of America.

I cook croquetas, and I eat jamon. I keep my diet 100% Mediterranean and drink my Rioja. In that sense, I have a piece of Spain in West Hollywood.

It's aggravating that Hollywood has never gotten credit for the role it played in promoting modern design.

I never wanted to work in fashion. At age 12 or 13, I wanted to design for showgirls - for the theater! And I was crazy for the Hollywood of the 1950s: Dietrich, Elizabeth Taylor, Jennifer Jones. They were my idea of glamour - and Sylvie Vartan, the French singer.

There has to be the popcorn genre element, or I don't engage the same way. I like action and vehicle design and guns and computer graphics as much as I like allegory. It's a constant balancing game. I want audiences to be on this rollercoaster that fits the Hollywood mould, but I also want them to absorb my observations.