Ray Bradbury has a vacation house in Palm Springs, California, in the desert at the base of the Santa Rosa mountains. It's a Rat Pack-era affair, with a chrome-and-turquoise kitchen and a small swimming pool in back.

Because I've been a full professor doing research and lecturing at the University of California, I didn't have a lot of time to write, so I have always used my unconscious a great deal to do the really heavy lifting.

I think you're lucky if you discover what you really love at a young age. College wasn't something I was going to do. I wanted to keep acting, and I didn't want to go to New York or California and pound the pavement.

Well, I'll tell you, one of things I'm proud of is for someone from Southern California, who didn't grow up around coal mines, I learned a lot that tragic day we lost twenty-nine miners at Upper Big Branch coal mine.

I do California casual a little bit better than really small European cut, tight apparel But I can rock some Gucci when I need to. I say this as I'm wearing Adidas sweatpants and a ten-year-old Chrome Hearts T-shirt.

My interest in acting was overwhelming, but I wasn't thinking, "I'm going to California and I'm going to become a movie star." Things were different then. I lived just for the moment, and whatever happened, happened.

I've always tried to write California history as American history. The paradox is that New England history is by definition national history, Mid-Atlantic history is national history. We're still suffering from that.

I was selling real estate at the time, in Pacific Palisades, California, so imagine that: getting a note and a bottle of champagne from Jack Nicholson when I'd barely made a dime as an actor. It really kept me going.

Like a physically beautiful but otherwise rather dull person who trades on his or her looks, Southern California swings perpetually between a profound inferiority complex and an equally profound sense of entitlement.

I like owning dirt. You know, I spent a lot of time broke when I moved to California. So deep in my soul is still this idea of being unemployed. To me, owning land means you could sell it at some point and have money.

Conoco will build a $75 million plant to see if a process to convert natural gas to liquid fuel is profitable. It has to be. In California, gasoline is so expensive that people are trying to run their cars on cocaine.

That's an economic development program in the metropolitan area. If they don't see that, and you don't get these things done, then you're competing with Texas and California and Atlanta; then you really have problems.

I have worked with this red all over the world - in Japan, California, France, Britain, Australia - a vein running round the earth. It has taught me about the flow, energy and life that connects one place with another.

I never pictured myself in California. I just thought I would be a character actress in New York on the stage. I never really had that stardom goal; I just wanted to be able to work as an actress and not as a waitress.

I didn't want to give up my Illinois driver's license and was unaware that was a crime. It is, by the way, in the state of California. Lesson learned. I technically broke a law, so technically I deserve whatever I get.

The longest, most solid and complex relationship in my life is with my mother. It started before I was born, and now, when I am 71 and living in California and she is 92 and living in Chile, we are still in touch daily.

California is a bellwether state. California was the first state in the United States to overturn the laws against interracial marriage. It took 19 years for the rest of the country to come around to that point of view.

I came to California in 1970 and so many people were asking if I was a Buddhist or knew Zen theory, asking if I was enlightened already or not. So I said, "Yes, I am enlightened," and then I studied quickly to catch up.

Now that I live in Southern California, my current world certainly speaks to me, and I sense that my next book will have a more American and southerly setting. But that's certainly not to say I won't be back to Leaford.

Dean's California--wild, sweaty, important, the land of lonely and exiled and eccentric lovers come to forgather like birds, and the land where everybody somehow looked like broken-down, handsome, decadent movie actors.

My uncle who helped in a big part of raising me from when I was young, had moved from California, and would just tell me these legendary stories of these motorcycle clubs that he was around and that he used to ride with.

Nuclear power plants built in the areas usually thought of as earthquake zones, such as the California coastline, have a surprisingly low risk of damage from those earthquakes. Why? They built anticipating a major quake.

It is puzzling why anyone would want to (become governor of California). It's like vying to become Roseanne Barr's next husband. Sure you'd get your name in the paper, but look at the mess you'd be getting yourself into.

I worry these days that Latinos in California speak neither Spanish nor English very well. They are in a kind of linguistic limbo between the two. They don't really have a language, and are, in some deep sense, homeless.

I'm not in Iraq. I'm here in California. Have I had an argument with my husband today? Have I been at war with someone in my life today - or with myself? Let me work on that. That way war is ending somewhere in the world.

I'd been in Sacramento a day and already noticed the pervasiveness of its homeless problem. The city seemed like California without the masks or pretense: a place where dreams were occasionally made but mostly torn apart.

I grew up in Northern California on the peninsula. It was a beautiful house, but it was very traditional. It wasn't midcentury modern. I'm talking 1970s, early '80s - design didn't even go 'Wall Street' until, like, 1986.

I grew up in an area of a lot of growth, in Orange County, California, and spent most of my youth on the beach. I had witnessed the degradation of our Back Bay and the increased number of closed beach days over the years.

Before I joined professional baseball, I started umpiring in San Diego, California. I worked 155 games in a five-month season. For three years in a row, I was working tripleheaders on Saturday and doubleheaders on Sunday.

The state is facing a unique and extraordinary set of challenges and opportunities that demand the involvement of all of us to address them. It's time for everyone to pull together to improve California's competitiveness.

My dad signed me up for some acting classes at a place in Honolulu, and there I got to audition for some L.A.-based talent agents. I got a few 'callbacks' and so my mom and I decided to fly to California and check it out!

I left Chicago many years ago to move to California. You can't help but live a healthy lifestyle here if you want to fit in. I find myself eating chicken and salad and chicken and salad and salad and chicken, like a monk.

When I moved out here to California, I became obsessed with geology. It's impossible not to be interested in the earth if you live in a place like this. I started to read a lot of geology, much to the horror of my friends.

Every day there are homeowners in California who will either receive relief so they can stay in their home, or will be in the foreclosure process and potentially lose their home. And that always weighed heavily on my mind.

Like so many named places in California it was less an identifiable city than a grouping of concepts--census tracts, special purpose bond-issue districts, shopping nuclei, all overlaid with access roads to its own freeway.

I went West and took part in the strike of the machinists - the Southern Pacific Railroad, the corporation that swung California by its golden tail, that controlled its legislature, its farmers, its preachers, its workers.

If you have a good story, it doesn’t have to be overproduced. I want our stories to reveal the wonders of the human spirit and the richness of life in California, including its history, people, culture and natural wonders.

I went West and took part in the strike of the machinists - the Southern Pacific Railroad, the corporation that swung California by its golden tail, that controlled its legislature, its farmers, its preachers, its workers.

California's drought affects everyone in the state, from farmers to fishermen, business owners to suburban residents, and everyone has a role to play in using precious water resources as wisely and efficiently as possible.

I am most grateful for having bad eyesight, which prevented me from becoming a commercial pilot and instead, led me to having the best job in the world - representing the people of California's 47th Congressional District.

It's not like I had big dreams to go to California and become an actor. I loved doing my shows at school and community theater, and I probably would have settled in New York because it was closer. I was going to go to NYU.

My mother was a very wonderful woman. When she and my dad divorced, she moved to California and worked two jobs in the cannery at night and as a waitress during the day. But she saved enough money to establish a restaurant.

As if this whole thing isn't confusing enough, election officials announced this week that the alphabet on the ballot will begin with the letter R, then W, then Q. You know, even Sesame Street is laughing at California now.

Within two years of my conversion, at a Bible conference at Mt. Hermon in California, I dedicated my life to the Lord for full-time service. And since then, I have been joyfully following in that path that He has led me on.

Arnold has succeeded at every level, and I believe he is the only person that can unite the people of this state and lead California from its current dysfunctional condition to the bright future that all residents long for.

Do you know anything at all that nobody else knows or, for that matter, gives a damn about? If you do, then sit tight, because one of these days you're going to Hollywood as a technical supervisor on a million dollar movie.

As a girl, I had zero interest in the stove. I've always had a healthy appetite, especially for the wonderful meat and the fresh produce of California, but I was never encouraged to cook and just didn't see the point in it.

I started writing "Peace Trail" here in Colorado, then I went back to California. I had a few other tunes going around in my head, so I had a couple of them finished after a few days and then I wanted to go into the studio.

I grew up in Southern California and there is a deep car culture there. I am now down to one car. It is a 1923 T pick up with 1000 hp. I have had a number of cars but little time and space so I have liquidated most of them.

I think that foreignness is always with you. Indeed, I find California more foreign to me the longer I live here. In thirty years of living here on and off, it hasn't lost anything of foreignness. If anything, it has gained.

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