Quotes

[on Lupe Velez's suicide, which occurred years before her own] I know how Lupe Velez felt. You fight just so long and then you begin to worry about being washed up. You fear there's one way to go and that's down.

I have no intention of ending my career in a rooming house, with full scrapbooks and an empty stomach.

Every girl in the world wants to find the right man, someone who is sympathetic and understanding and helpful and strong, someone she can love madly.

Although I avoided dramatics--and everything else--in school. I wanted to be a success on the stage, the screen or the radio. So I saved my money and when I had bus fare and $16.82 over, I told my mother, Clara, I was going to leave home. She was heartbroken, but she believed in me.

We had a wonderful time everywhere overseas. But it was hard. For five months we never gave less than five shows a day. It was too cold to sleep nights and there wasn't water enough to take a bath. I had to do my own washing. And I ate more sand and fog than food.

I want to be as good an actress as Bette Davis, and I'd like to be a great singer. But more than that, I'd like to be happily married and have some children.

A man can be an absolute heel and a woman, knowing it, can still be madly in love with him.

Stardom is merely some talent, a few breaks and a lot of publicity. I have the talent, the publicity will come and so will the breaks. Just give me a couple of years.

I think sex is definitely here to stay so I don't see any necessity for throwing it in people's faces. I don't think a girl has to wear dresses cut down to her tummy to exhibit what is known as feminine allure. She can exhibit it in a high neck dress but subtly. Heaven knows I want people to think I have sex appeal. But I also want to think I have something besides sex appeal.

The only thing I've found out about love is that I don't know anything about it. I wish somebody would tell me what it's really like. I've made a couple of guesses. But that business about 'women's intuition' just isn't true. Not in my case, anyway.

I should have been a clown. I am always getting slapped. The slaps come from every direction, from the people I want to help, from those I want to love, for the big and little guys I am sorry for.

Anyone in public life gets used to unkind rumors after a time. Though all of them are very upsetting when they are published and spoken about publicly, particularly by those in the business who are, shall I say, jealous of your success. I have learned to stand up to them by ignoring them and not dignifying them with an answer.