Quotes

This is the age of insincerity. The movies had the misfortune to come along in the twentieth century, and because they appeal to the masses there can be no sincerity in them. Hollywood is tied hand and foot to the demands for artificiality of the masses all over the world.

I've got a lot of ham in me.

I can remember when nobody believed an actor and didn't care what he believed. Why, the fact that he was an actor made everything he said open to question, because acting was thought to be a vocation embraced exclusively by scatter-brains, wastrels and scamps. I don't believed that's true today and I don't think that it ever was.

[1943 comment on Margaret O'Brien] If that child had been born in the middle ages, she'd have been burned as a witch.

You can't retire in Hollywood. Nobody gives up a job, even if he's ninety, or sick, or has money like Midas. Everybody works until his last breath, and when one day they die, they die like Napoleon/s grenadiers, who died with the words "Vive l'Empereur!" Just so, the last words of a director or producer are "Make another take!"

L.B. [MGM chief Louis B. Mayer] gets me $400 worth of cocaine a day to ease my pain. I don't know where he gets it. And I don't care. But I bless him every time it puts me to sleep.

[on how he intends to perform his role in 'Arsene Lupin'] Oh, I'll stumble around, growl a little, limp a little bit.

Don't ever forget that acting is the greatest profession ever invented. When you act, you move millions of people, shape their lives, give them a sense of exaltation. No other profession has that power.

[when asked by a writer to compose his own epitaph] Well, I've played everything but a harp.

I didn't want to act. I wanted to paint or draw. The theater was not in my blood, I was related to the theater by marriage only; it was merely a kind of in-law of mine I had to live with.