California Beach Sayings

#1. FOR MOST OF MY LIFE I couldn't have found Idaho on a map. I had no picture of the place in my mind, nothing like a California beach or a Texas oil field. Potato trees, is what I thought on the drive out. Rows

Shawn Vestal

#2. Sometime in the early Seventies, gender-free toys were briefly a popular idea. So at Christmas on the California beach in 1972, we downplayed the dolls with frilly dresses and loaded up Santa's sack with toy trucks and earth movers for our three daughters.

Tom Brokaw

#3. The full California workup: shopping on Rodeo Drive, a ridiculously overpriced lunch at the Ivy, an afternoon at the beach, and dinner at a quaint outdoor bistro in Santa Monica.

Julie James

#4. The percentage of gays is the same, probably, as anywhere. Most bodybuilders are straight, regular street guys, though a lot aren't serious. Many in California are punks, beach bums just lying around in the sun and maybe collecting unemployment.

Arnold Schwarzenegger

#5. When I was eight, I would look at the cover of the 'Ghost Rider' comic book in my little home in Long Beach, California, and I couldn't get my head around how something that scary could also be good. To me it was my first philosophical awakening - 'How is this possible, this duality?'

Nicolas Cage

#6. It's funny, but when I arrived in California to start college I was much more interested in becoming a surfer and cruise along in life from one beach to the next. I didn't plan out any huge career for myself.

Benicio Del Toro

#7. I love living in California and being able to go to the beach or go to the woods.

Tracy Chapman

#8. I move between San Francisco and Paris ... I have a wonderful beach house in California.

Danielle Steel

#9. Quite honestly, I live in California in the off season. Going off to Green Bay is just like two different walks of life - I hunt, fish, practice with firearms. Back in California, it's spend time at the beach, go to the movies.

Clay Matthews III

#10. In California, I do like to just chill out and go to the beach, but I love the energy here. I feel very productive when I'm in New York.

Ashley Greene

#11. I was born and raised in Huntington Beach, California. I was very athletic, playing volleyball and softball. I did gymnastics for about ten years, too.

Jasmine Tookes

#12. 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.

Aaron Peirsol

#13. I was born in Orange, California and I grew up in Huntington Beach. I started skateboarding when I was five and continued to do so off and on over the years.

Jason Lee

#14. I started attending community college when I was 14 or 15, just doing general education stuff like history and mathematics. Then I went on to California State University Long Beach to pursue a degree in journalism. And then I ended up dropping out to found Oculus.

Palmer Luckey

#15. In California I began to think that, except on the beaches, no-one had the use of their legs.

Rumer Godden

#16. The underground is not a place but a way of life. You can be underground most anywhere, from the Upper West Side of Manhattan to Hermosa Beach, California.

Bryan Burrough

#17. In Huntington Beach, California, three police instructors lost their jobs after ordering two cadets who were caught smoking to eat cigarette sandwiches as punishment. And of course the tobacco companies are thinking, 'Cigarette sandwiches - what a great idea.

Jay Leno

#18. I know," I say. "It sucks. Let's go get tacos and sit on the beach.

Nina LaCour

#19. These people, as far as I can see, do not congregate in the notorious centers of the movement, like the North Beach in San Francisco or Greenwich Village, or Venice, California.

Alan Watts

#20. I grew up in the Midwest, quite far from any ocean or any beach, a million miles. I think for kids who grew up where I did, the idea of California, surfing and beach life was so exotic and glamorous.

John Malkovich

#21. I was born and raised in Santa Cruz, California, and the whole lifestyle revolves around the beach. My parents met surfing, and the beach was a major part of our daily lives.

Marisa Miller

#22. I grew up in Southern California so I was always at the beach and outdoors. I remember my dad laying around the pool baking; he was practically George Hamilton.

C. J. Wilson

#23. California to me as a concept or as an idea always seems like endless optimism and endless opportunity - when people think of California they think of palm trees and blue skies and gorgeous sunsets and beaches and everything else.

Mark Hoppus

#24. In California, I'm more of a beach chick, and I kind of take on a model city girl when I'm in New York.

Gigi Hadid

#25. There are not many places in the world where you can get to the beach in an hour, the desert in two hours and snowboarding or skiing in three hours. You can do all that in California.

Alex Pettyfer

#26. I like to take long naps. I like long walks on the beach. The perfect day is back home, California, going to the beach with a couple of friends, laying out in the sunshine, get a nice bronze.

Keaton Stromberg

#27. I have two houses in California, and they're both within a couple of minutes from the beach. So, I definitely feel at home in California and by the ocean.

Marisa Miller

#28. Myths that need clarification: "Everyone in California lives on a white, sandy beach." False. The only people who live on California beaches are vacationers from Arizona, Utah, and Nevada who own condos.

Erma Bombeck

#29. I feel so fortunate. I was brought up along the beaches in Southern California, and then got to have horses.

Bo Derek

#30. In fall 1967, I was given leave of absence by the National Public Affairs Research Foundation to move to Redondo Beach, California, to work on a short-term research contract with TRW.

Preston Manning

#31. Here's an uplifting story. Congratulations to the Little League team from Huntington Beach, California. Yeah, they beat Japan to win the Little League World Series. That's pretty good. See, that proves that when math and science aren't involved, our kids can beat anybody.

Jay Leno

#32. There are two Venices I know about and one of them is a hotel in Vegas. The other is an L.A. beach where pretty girls walk their dogs while wearing as little as possible and mutant slabs of tanned, posthuman beef sip iced steroid lattes and pump iron until their pecs are the size of Volkswagens.

Richard Kadrey

#33. I do get credit for having a California sound to my music, but I don't think people really know what that means - they think the Beach Boys. I'm thinking more like Sunset Strip in the 1960s and stuff like that.

Ariel Pink

#34. I don't know a lot of guys who started out as a hard rock and roller with a white stripe in their hair. Suddenly I do a TV movie and I wake up the next day and I'm a teen idol, like I'd laid on a beach in California all my life waiting for that to happen.

Rex Smith

#35. In these fast and fickle times, it's nice to know that there are some things you can always count on: the enduring brilliance of the last page of The Great Gatsby; the near-religious harmonies of the Beach Boys' "California Girls"; and the lifelong friendship of Matt Damon and Ben Affleck.

Sarah Vowell