Bohemia by the bay, paradise on the skids....

"Venice is like doing acid. If you can't take it with you after you either come down or move away, you were never really there in the first place."
Anne Alexander

"Fear and loathing meet the best sunsets this side of Hawaii; dog shit meets a sweet ocean breeze; golden tans meet boozy pallors.....This place is so odd, unique...."
Michele Kort

"America's smorgasbord of the rationally challenged."
Doug Lansky

"Venice West is to Los Angeles what the Left Bank once was to Paris."
Lawrence Lipton

  "...only artists and criminals in those days. Venice West was a city of outsiders. It was (and still is) a last stop-off at the edge of America. ...Ocean and outlaws. Its setting is a perfect balance for poetry. Beauty and danger. Agony and rapture."
Philomene Long

"Ah, Venice, where one crazy man's canal dream has spawned more California stereotypes, hack artists and hippie coffee houses than anywhere outside of Santa Cruz."

Stephen Blackmoore

"Venice was and is full of lost places where people put up for sale the last worn bits of their souls, hoping no one will buy."
Ray Bradbury

"You used to be able to have a fat ass and wear a string bikini and shades; you could walk down the Venice Boardwalk with a joint in your mouth and fall in love. Now it’s an audition."
Susie Bright

"San Francisco may be slightly more sophisticated and cultured than Venice, but the only difference is in the apparal. The tiedye remains eternal..."
Vinnie Caggiano

"Venice Beach: proof of the biological impossibility of imagining a person being simultaneously good-looking and poor."
Douglas Coupland

 "Venice is as far west as you can get - in every way."
Keith Kirts

"I have looked for the center of the art scene. I went to Paris as a student. I lived in Venice, California."
Eleanor Coppola

"I don't know of any place that loves so passionately, hates so vehemently, or forgives so easily as Venice. "
Moe Stavnezer

"This is the only place that I don't feel out of place, because everyone here is out of place."
Arnold Schwarzenegger

For more Venice Quotes.

And finally, a little bit of trivia:

Venice had changed in thirty years. The big indoor swimming pool and the amusement pier, with its Race Through the Clouds, were gone. Most of the canals had been abandoned or were filled with stagnant water. There were still trams that ran up and down the deserted beach walk, carrying a few elderly Jewish passengers, but most shops on Windward Avenue and on the ocean front were empty. The little grocery store on the corner sold maggot-infested meat. The whole neighborhood was so creepily shabby, so oddly macabre that Orson Welles used it as a set for his noir movie, Touch of Evil.
George Garrigues

If it's good enough for Orson...