I don’t wanna live in a city where the only cultural advantage is that you can make a right turn on a red light.

It is in love with its limitless horizontality, as New York may be with its verticality.

It’s like a jumble of huts in a jungle somewhere. I don’t understand how you can live there. It’s really, completely dead. Walk along the street, there’s nothing moving. I’ve lived in small Spanish fishing villages which were literally sunny all day long every day of the week, but they weren’t as boring as Los Angeles.

Billboards, billboards, drink this, eat that, use all manner of things, everyone, the best, the cheapest, the purest and most satisfying of all their available counterparts. Red lights flicker on every horizon, airplanes beware; cars flash by, more lights. Workers repair the gas main. Signs, signs, lights, lights, streets, streets.

Twenty-four hours a day somebody is running, somebody else is trying to catch him. Out there in the night of a thousand crimes people were dying, being maimed, cut by flying glass, crushed against steering wheels or under heavy car tyres. People were being beaten, robbed, strangled, raped, and murdered. People were hungry, sick, bored, desperate with loneliness or remorse or fear, angry, cruel, feverish, shaken by sobs. A city no worse than others, a city rich and vigorous and full of pride, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness.

The freeway experience … is the only secular communion Los Angeles has. … Actual participation requires a total surrender, a concentration so intense as to seem a kind of narcosis, a rapture-of-the-freeway. The mind goes clean. The rhythm takes over.

Thought is barred in this City of Dreadful Joy and conversation is unknown.

Prejudices are useless. Call Los Angeles any dirty name you like — Six Suburbs in Search of a City, Paradise with a Lobotomy, anything — but the fact remains that you are already living in it before you get there.

There are two modes of transport in Los Angeles: car and ambulance. Visitors who wish to remain inconspicuous are advised to choose the latter

If Los Angeles is not the one authentic rectum of civilization, then I am no anatomist. Any time you want to go out again and burn it down, count me in.