"California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom."
— Don DeLillo (White Noise)

"So when he asked about getting high, I didn't think, I agreed. We smoked some good California green. Took three tries to put me in the place he said I should be."
— Ellen Hopkins

"Soon it got dusk, a grapy dusk, a purple dusk over tangerine groves and long melon fields; the sun the color of pressed grapes, slashed with burgandy red, the fields the color of love and Spanish mysteries."
— Jack Kerouac (On the Road)

"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."
— Jack Kerouac (On the Road)

"This morning I saw a coyote walking through the sagebrush right at the very edge of the ocean ― next stop China. The coyote was acting like he was in New Mexico or Wyoming, except that there were whales passing below. That’s what this country does for you. Come down to Big Sur and let your soul have some room to get outside its marrow."
— Richard Brautigan (A Confederate General from Big Sur)

"In 1970, a superior Court judge issues an order forcing the desegregation of Los Angeles schools. The judge survives an assassination attempt and loses his job in the next election."
— James Frey (Bright Shiny Morning)

"1954. Smog prevents airplanes from landing and ships from docking for three days."
— James Frey (Bright Shiny Morning)

"It seemed like a matter of minutes when we began rolling in the foothills before Oakland and suddenly reached a height and saw stretched out ahead of us the fabulous white city of San Francisco on her eleven mystic hills with the blue Pacific and its advancing wall of potato-patch fog beyond, and smoke and goldenness in the late afternoon of time."
— Jack Kerouac (On the Road)

"Out yonder they may curse, revile, and torture one another, defile all the human instincts, make a shambles of creation (if it were in their power), but here, no, here, it is unthinkable, here there is abiding peace, the peace of God, and the serene security created by a handful of good neighbors living at one with the creature world."
— Henry Miller

"There are no real Californians. There are only people who live there and people who don't."
— Laura Kalpakian (Steps and Exes: A Novel of Family)

"We are Bay Aryans from Berkeley: prepare to be reengineered in an attractive range of color schemes for your safety and comfort!"
— Charles Stross (On Her Majesty's Occult Service)

"I grew up in a utopia, I did. California when I was a child was a child's paradise, I was healthy, well fed, well clothed, well housed. I went to school and there were libraries with all the world in them and after school I played in orange groves and in Little League and in the band and down at the beach and every day was an adventure. . . . I grew up in utopia."
— Kim Stanley Robinson (Pacific Edge: Three Californias)

"The two girls grew up at the edge of the ocean and knew it was paradise, and better than Eden, which was only a garden."
— Eve Babitz (Sex and rage: Advice to young ladies eager for a good time : a novel)

"A country that has yielded a billion and a half of gold is, perforce, well and favorably known to the uttermost parts of the earth. Though the stream of yellow wealth diminishes, or even ceases to flow, yet the channel is carved through which the thoughts of men longingly roll. Upon such a land no limit of impossibility is placed."
— Frank Lewis Nason (The Vision Of Elijah Berl)

"Southern California is the land of crazy crimes."
— Don Carpenter (From a Distant Place)

"The wild mustard in Southern California is like that spoken of in the New Testament. . . . Its gold is as distinct a value to the eye as the nugget gold is in the pocket."
— Helen Hunt Jackson (Ramona)

"It was a splendid population - for all the slow, sleepy, sluggish-brained sloths stayed at home - you never find that sort of people among pioneers - you cannot build pioneers out of that sort of material. It was that population that gave to California a name for getting up astounding enterprises and rushing them through with a magnificent dash and daring and a recklessness of cost or consequences, which she bears unto this day - and when she projects a new surprise the grave world smiles as usual and says, "Well, that is California all over."
— Mark Twain (Roughing It)