California Influence Quotes

The oil dinosaurs want to win so badly in my home state because what happens here matters everywhere. The nation often follows where California goes.

There is a theory that sooner or later anything in America that is any fun at all will be ruined by people from California.

Fads get hot in California. A good idea can come from Des Moines, but it's not going to be anything there. Then it'll hit Venice Beach or Westwood and go all around the country, back to Des Moines.

I never even held a guitar until I was 23 and living in California, but then loved it. I'm really not an accomplished instrumentalist. Maybe that has something to do with why I write and sing.

California has often led the country, indeed the world, in the technology, consumption, trends, lifestyles, and of course, mass entertainment. It is where the car found its earliest and fullest expression, where suburbs blossomed, where going to gym replaced going to church, where forces that lead so many to assume that direct democracy is the wave of the future - declining political parties, telecommuting, new technology, the internet generation 0 are all most well developed in this vast land.

Sometimes I think I might not have written 'The Age of Miracles' if I hadn't grown up in California, if I hadn't been exposed to its very particular blend of beauty and disaster, of danger and denial.

Growing up in northern California has had a big influence on my love and respect for the outdoors. When I lived in Oakland, we would think nothing of driving to Half Moon Bay and Santa Cruz one day and then driving to the foothills of the Sierras the next day.

I didn't study writing. I didn't write anything substantial until I got to California.

As goes California, so goes the rest of the nation.

Future historians, I hope, will consider the American fast food industry a relic of the twentieth century--a set of attitudes, systems, and beliefs that emerged from postwar southern California, that embodied its limitless faith in technology, that quickly spread across the globe, flourished briefly, and then receded, once its true costs became clear and its thinking became obsolete.

Whatever starts in California unfortunately has an inclination to spread.

The D.C. playbook is obsolete. It's time for the people of California to bring the agenda to Washington, not the other way around.

I think, and a lot of that has to do with where I grew up in California; [status] isn't something I think about that much.