Lydia Millet Quotes

Today, people are more into the glitz and the glamour of everything. We don't even read the inside of records anymore.

The 'Gossip Girl' idea and ideologies, like, they sort of encourage this certain kind of, like, materialism and superficiality that isn't, I would say, the best thing in the world.

I can't get sucked into that celebrity thing, because I think it's just crass.

Sometimes America gets tempted by the glitz and glamour.

I just don't feel much interested in the lifestyles of the rich and famous.

TV likes you to talk about the superficial.

You often see lifestyle over substance in L.A. Some rock stars dress up like they're going to play a gig when they're just going to the 7-Eleven store on a Tuesday night.

We're consumers. We are by-products of a lifestyle obsession. Murder, crime, poverty, these things don't concern me. What concerns me are celebrity magazines, television with 500 channels, some guy's name on my underwear. Rogaine, Viagra, Olestra...

You don't want to be a Kardashian.

If a Martian came down to Earth and watched television, he'd come to conclusion that all the world's society is based on Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. He'd be amazed that our society hasn't collapsed.

America is supposed to be given over to ugliness. There are a good many ugly things there and the ugliest are the most pretentious.

I have no interest in changing Hollywood. Hollywood is a place so consumed by the spirit of the world that I don't even want to try to think about how to infiltrate that.

Hollywood is kind of a bad world.

There are so many people who just want a flashy object in front of their eyes and don't want to think at all; I find that disturbing.

Consumerism is at once the engine of America and simultaneously one of the most revealing indicators of our collective shallowness.

My first book, 'Fast Forward', was about growing up in the shadow of Hollywood and how kids are affected by the culture of materialism and the cult of celebrity, and I've often felt the reason my work has an audience in the U.K. is because it's everything the British love to hate about the Americans.

American mass media culture, with its celebrities, shopping hysteria, sound bites, formulaic plots, received ideas, and nauseating repetitions, depresses me.

I am beginning to loathe & detest all that Hollywood represents.

I'm cynical about the type of girl that swirls in the Hollywood community.

Of course L.A. has its mad bits: you can get a collagen cappuccino if that's what you really want. But the American Dream is so ingrained in the American culture, and the place you go to find it is L.A.

The more celebrities I meet, the more disappointed I get in celebrity culture.

From the clayey soil of northern Wyoming is mined bentonite, which is used as filler in candy, gum, and lipstick. We Americans are great on fillers, as if what we have, what we are, is not enough. We have a cultural tendency toward denial, but being affluent, we strangle ourselves with what we can buy. We gave only to look at the houses we build to see how we build *against* space, the way we drink against pain and loneliness. We fill up space as if it were a pie shell, with things whose opacity further obstructs our ability to see what is already there.

You start admiring someone who's famous for actually doing something---imagine that---and I swear to you I will buy you every item in her entire wardrobe. But over my own dead body will I spend my own time and money turning you into a clone of some brain-dead waste of skin who thinks the pinnacle of achievement is selling her wedding shots to a magazine.

I love everything [Jessica Simpson] ever has on! Jessica can definitely come pick me up in her little Mercedes and take me shopping if she wants!

The people who are making a lot of money and eating at McDonald's and watching MTV and have square eyeballs, they're over there. And then maybe there's like five other people left in America and I'm just waiting for them to come up with something interesting.