I always wanted to be a Californian. In my wildest dreams I always liked California - it's the place where oranges grows on trees! Fruit just falls off the trees.

I came at age in the '60s and initially my hopes and dreams were invested in politics and the movements of the time - the anti-war movement the civil rights movement. I worked on Bobby Kennedy's campaign for president as a teenager in California and the night he was killed.

If you're the type of person who has to fulfill your dreams you've gotta be resourceful to make sure you can do it. I came out to California when I was 21 thinking my New York credentials would take me all the way. I came back home a year later all dejected and a failure.

No wonder the film industry started in the desert in California where like all desert dwellers they dream their buildings rather than design them.

Death Valley is really wide-open - it's bigger than Rhode Island - and it's less a part of California than an ungoverned territory so there's lots of weird cops-and-robbers stuff going on.

Crucial to understanding federalism in modern day America is the concept of mobility or 'the ability to vote with your feet.' If you don't support the death penalty and citizens packing a pistol - don't come to Texas. If you don't like medicinal marijuana and gay marriage don't move to California.

My family belongs to a tennis club in Valencia California so I always go there. I play a lot of tennis with my dad and swim. And I like to go to the gym there.

Well it's a little harder in New York. It's not as forgiving to a film crew. You hold up a bunch of New Yorkers who can't cross the street they're not going to take it well. Southern California? They'll wait. It's cool man. In New York they're like 'Are you kidding me? I gotta get to work.'

I've been in California for about 15 years now. You're always in your car and insulated. I miss New York so much.

I arrived in California with no job no car and no money but like millions of other girls a dream.

I was an economics major in college and every summer after school I would drive my car from California from Claremont men's college at the time to New York. And I worked on Wall Street.

You know every family and every business in California knows what it means to go through tough times.

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.

Unless action is taken soon - unless we can display the same vision of that earlier period - we will lose the treasure of California's open space and environmental beauty.

I basically left Texas with no money. I was making $3.50 working in some mall so I didn't have a lot of cash. I took $1 000 and headed to California. Along the way I stopped in Vegas because I had always wanted to see Caesar's Palace. So I stopped there and won $2 500 on a slot machine! It was amazing.

Southern California they have been amazing. They're totally with us.

I've been through the process qualifying for the World Cup which is an amazing two-year process. It was an honor to represent the U.S. and to represent the city of Los Angeles and California.

Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.

There's one Baldessari work I genuinely love and would like to own maybe because of my Midwestern roots and love of driving alone. 'The backs of all the trucks passed while driving from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara California Sunday 20 January 1963' consists of a grid of 32 small color photographs depicting just what the title says.