In Los Angeles, everyone is a star.

If a star or studio chief or any other great movie personages find themselves sitting among a lot of nobodies, they get frightened – as if somebody was trying to demote them.

I think Pebble Beach is kind of a unique place on the planet.

I had three points I wanted to make: That not everybody in Hollywood is on the left, that Obama has broken a lot of the promises he made when he took office, and that the people should feel free to get rid of any politician who’s not doing a good job. But I didn’t make up my mind exactly what I was going to say until I said it.

I came to Hollywood and within a decade I was one of the biggest action stars of all time.

I now have two different audiences. There’s the one that has been watching my action films for 20 years, and the American family audience. American jokes, less fighting.

Streaming is a really big market for me. We’ve been doing great in the streaming market, so it’s not something I want to alienate at all. Streaming counts now. They’re treating artists the way we deserve to be treated.

I suppose I am reluctant about being any sort of ‚star‘ and I didn’t particularly want to be portrayed as one.

The movies are the only business where you can go out front and applaud yourself.

Plagiarism is always the biggest thing in Hollywood.

I seem to be getting a lot of things pushed my way that are strong women. It’s like people see Hackers and they send me offers to play tough women with guns, the kind who wear no bra and a little tank top. I’d like to play strong women who are also very feminine.

I’m already the face of the UFC, plus the face of boxing, WWE, and Hollywood.

The celebrity-chef thing, even at its worst, its most annoying, its silliest, its goofiest, its most egregious and cynical, has been a good thing.

I’ve seen too many ups and downs in the movie industry.

I’m not a chick-flick enthusiast.

I want to be an executive producer.

If anything, a lot of electronic music is music that no one listens to at home, hardly. It’s really only to be heard when everyone’s out enjoying it.

I did the Ed Sullivan show four times. I did the Steve Allen show. I did the Jackie Gleason show.

Later on they send me to Hollywood. To make movies. It was all new to me. I was only 21 years old.

I was born to play Hercules. I have loved and honored the mythology over the years – since I was a kid. When I first broke into Hollywood, ‚Hercules‘ was one of the movies that I – not chased, because I didn’t have the power to chase anything – but always had in the back of my mind.

Whatever starts in California unfortunately has an inclination to spread.

In California, they don’t throw their garbage away – they make it into TV shows.

I don’t think I’m supposed to boss other people around just because I’m a so-called celebrity or star. I hate that when people act that way. No one deserves it. I’ve seen it happen. I don’t call those people out – they know who they are. Some enjoy that reputation.

In Hollywood a girl’s virtue is much less important than her hairdo.

I’d done a lot of research in Hollywood and in academia. I love research and so I wanted to kind of ground the book in history, in things that I read that were universal and timeless and then kind of let my own experiences sort of filter through all of this history.

Remember that before ‚Roe v. Wade‘ was decided, there were four states that allowed abortion in the first trimester if that’s what the woman sought: New York, Hawaii, California, Alaska. Other states were shifting. And people were fighting over this issue in state legislatures.

It’s no secret that we were sticking just about every nickel we had on the chance that people would really be interested in something totally new and unique in the field of entertainment.

Dakota Fanning is a child, but she is a wonderful actor. I don’t know what a child actor is. She’s an actor who’s a child.

I can promise you that when I go to Sacramento, I will pump up Sacramento.

Meryl Streep is exactly as awesome as you would imagine Meryl Streep to be.

When you’re doing a film and the majority of the film is cast black, for me, it’s most important to get people to view those movies as just movies, as just good movies. At the end of the day, regardless of the color of the cast, we’re all doing the same thing in this business: trying to make a good film.

I don’t like celebrities; I don’t hang out with them; I don’t relate to that life.

I personally don’t like to go see romantic comedies. But people do want to see them, and they seem to want to see me in them.

I sure lost my musical direction in Hollywood. My songs were the same conveyer belt mass production, just like most of my movies were.

Fame can take interesting men and thrust mediocrity upon them.

There is a level of snobbery and fickleness in L.A.

What’s fascinating is, people in Washington would rather spend time in Hollywood, and people in Hollywood would rather spend time in Washington.

People want to act like they know celebrities. They want to see pictures. They want to know where you’re going. They want to hear you talk about your family.

If I close my eyes and think of Hollywood, all I see is one big varicose vein.

I speak directly to the people, and I know that the people of California want to have better leadership. They want to have great leadership. They want to have somebody that will represent them. And it doesn’t matter if you’re a Democrat or a Republican, young or old.

I stopped watching TV because of ‚The Wire.‘ Like, ‚The Wire‘ ruined everything for me because I don’t even want to watch anything else now.

If we could do high-speed rail in California just half a notch above what they’ve done on the Shanghai line in China, and if we had a straight path from L.A. to San Francisco, as well as the milk run, at least that would be progress.

When I was a kid, I loved Elvis, and Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones. But I had no connection to Hollywood – and being a movie star was such a far-fetched idea, growing up in Hawaii.

I want to try something different in Hollywood, to tell the audience I am not just an actor star – I am an actor, too.

There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools and she was bused to school every day. That little girl was me.

In terms of mathematics textbooks, why can’t you have the scale of a national market? Right now, we have a Texas textbook that’s different from a California textbook that’s different from a Massachusetts textbook. That’s very expensive.

In Hollywood, they think they know it all. You, as a writer, are essentially an outsider. Novelists and short-story writers, especially.

I’ve taken so many kids out of Pittsburgh and onto the great white way in New York City right into a Broadway show.

I think there ought to be some serious discussion by smart people, really smart people, about whether or not proliferation of things like The Smoking Gun and TMZ and YouTube and the whole celebrity culture is healthy.

If I want to be called ‚The Rock,‘ I’ll be called ‚The Rock.‘ If I want to go back to wrestling, I’ll go back to wrestling.

Too much TV hurts movies.

Anyone who doesn’t have a great time in San Francisco is pretty much dead to me.

I’m just changing the game because I know what the fans want and the people want ‚cause I’m a fan of hip-hop.

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.

I used to think as I looked out on the Hollywood night, ‚There must be thousands of girls sitting alone like me dreaming of being a movie star.‘ But I’m not going to worry about them. I’m dreaming the hardest.

There are a lot of conservative people, a lot of moderate people, Republicans, Democrats, in Hollywood. It is just that the conservative people by the nature of the word itself play closer to the vest. They do not go around hot dogging it.

Hollywood is not suited for me, and I am not suited for it.

Michelle Pfeiffer hasn’t been finding a lot of work recently because she doesn’t like what a woman her age is offered. That’s a real double standard. You get Sean Connery, who gets older and older, still playing opposite young ladies, but it doesn’t work the other way around.

When I have been asked during these last weeks who caused the riots and the killing in L.A., my answer has been direct and simple: Who is to blame for the riots? The rioters are to blame. Who is to blame for the killings? The killers are to blame.

I laugh all the time – at things, people, stuff, whatever. But, I don’t laugh onstage because then it’s serious business.

I think California has the best energy.