Quotes

You once liked the blissful mobility, but then you wonder, who's the real you? And who's the chap on the screen? You know, I catch myself acting out my life like a goddamn script.

They've great respect for the dead in Hollywood, but none for the living.

I do what I like.

I like my whiskey old and my women young.

I've had a hell of a lot of fun and I've enjoyed every minute of it.

I can't reconcile my gross habits with my net income.

I intend to live the first half of my life. I don't care about the rest.

The public has always expected me to be a playboy, and a decent chap never lets his public down.

It isn't what they say about you, it's what they whisper.

If I have any genius it is a genius for living.

I felt like an impostor, taking all that money for reciting ten or twelve lines of nonsense a day.

Women won't let me stay single, and I won't let myself stay married.

I allow myself to be understood as a colorful fragment in a drab world.

I've made six or seven good films - the others, not so good.

My job is to defy the normal.

By instinct I'm an adventurer; by choice I'd like to be a writer; by pure, unadulterated luck, I'm an actor.

I had now made about forty-five pictures, but what had I become? I knew all too well: a phallic symbol. All over the world I was, as a name and personality, equated with sex.

I had no greatness, only a deadly fear of mediocrity.

I still had some will left. Some of that I directed to a very lovely-looking redhead who occupied a cubicle in the lobby entrance of the City Hall. Day by day I passed by her and watched how she sold chewing gum.

Bette was a dynamic creature, the great big star of the lot, but not physically my type; dominating everybody around, and especially me.

[on New Guinea] I took a look at where I was, roaming from spot to spot ... looking for gold, bumping and bumbling about like a blind bumblebee, hoping for a chance, plunging at a jungle with bare hands.

I laughed. My friends laughed. I had pals. They had yachts. We dined on their yachts or they dined on ours.

I am dangerous to be with because, since I live dangerously, others are subject to the danger that I expose myself to. They, more likely than I, will get hurt.

[on his first rape trial] Who approaches a prospective sweetheart asking her to whip out her birth certificate, or driver's license, or show a letter from her mother?

I might have been guilty as hell - under the law, that is. But in the world of day-to-day common sense ... everybody knew that the girls had asked for it, whether or not I had my wicked ways with them.

I have been in rebellion against God and government ever since I can remember.

I make more today being a shadow of my former self than I did when I was my former self.

I felt used. Used by the studio. Used to make money. Used by the press for fun. Used by society as a piece of chalk to provide the world with a dab of color.

Maybe I haven't been such a loss after all. Anybody who can bring a few moments of happiness to another human life certainly can't be wasting his time in an otherwise fear-ridden and often very drab world. Maybe it hasn't all been so futile. Maybe it wasn't all a waste.