I turn up in Los Angeles every now and then so I can get some big money films in order to finance my smaller money films.

We had an interesting thing at that first dinner. It was prior to the availability of several new hotels in Los Angeles and we were more or less committed to the old Ambassador Hotel that has the famous Coconut Grove.

In Los Angeles as I gained and lost celebrity then gained it again I often found myself wondering why I out of thousands like me had become famous.

I kept saying that I'd never live in L.A. and I didn't think I would. But that's where the work is and I ended up making a lot of friends there and my old friends moved out to Los Angeles too. And also I think when you're famous its hard to live in a small town.

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.

Los Angeles was an impression of failure of disappointment of despair and of oddly makeshift lives. This is California? I thought.

In high school I was on the youth advisory council for the Mayor's Office of Los Angeles and that was kind of my first experience in the bureaucratic system. We tried to get things done and nobody was really interested in getting anything done.

I did a play called Throne of Straw when I was 11 at the Odyssey Theatre in Los Angeles. It became really clear to me at that point that I enjoyed acting more than any other experience I was having.

We have a project with Unocal here in Los Angeles where we as an environmental organization the oil company and the state all get together to promote the recycling of used motor oil.

If we talk about the environment for example we have to talk about environmental racism - about the fact that kids in South Central Los Angeles have a third of the lung capacity of kids in Santa Monica.