Quotes

I have decided that when I am a star, I will be every inch and every moment a star.

All creative people should be required to leave California for three months every year.

I think all this talk about age is foolish. Every time I'm one year older, everyone else is too.

I've given my memoirs far more thought than any of my marriages. You can't divorce a book.

When I die, my epitaph should read "She Paid the Bills". That's the story of my private life.

[In 1922] I have gone through a long apprenticeship. I have gone through enough of being a nobody. I have decided that when I am a star, I will be every inch and every moment the star! Everybody from the studio gateman to the highest executive will know it.

[To her mother following her triumphant return to Hollywood in 1924 after making Madame Sans-Gêne (1925) in France] It's the saddest night of my life. I'm just 26. Where do I go from here?

[on her role in Airport 1975 (1974)] I was holding out for a picture I could take my grandchildren to see, something exciting and contemporary without senseless violence.

[on her pre-Cecil B. DeMille years as a comedienne working for Mack Sennett] I played my comedies like Duse [serious classical actress Eleonora Duse], which is probably why I was so funny.

It's amazing to find that so many people, who I thought really knew me, could have thought that Sunset Boulevard (1950) was autobiographical. I've got nobody floating in my swimming pool.

[on Marlene Dietrich] Her legs may be longer than mine, but unlike me, she doesn't have 7 grandchildren.

After 16 years in pictures I could not be intimidated easily, because I knew where all the skeletons were buried.

After seven years in one place, not to mention two marriages and 32 pictures, I felt I had earned a vacation.

After years of negotiating, I felt bitter and resentful about Mr. Lasky [Jesse L. Lasky] and Paramount and I knew I always would.

A crisis arose when several newspapers questioned whether my singing voice was real. I had not sung--they wanted to know why.

All they had to do was put my name on a marquee and watch the money roll in.

As Daddy said, life is 95 percent anticipation.

At 26, I felt myself a victim rather than a victor in the realm of pictures.

By the time I was 15, my mother had turned me into a real clotheshorse.

Every victory is also a defeat.

Hollywood has called me in turn "The Clothes Horse", "The Old Grey Mare"--and "Death of a Saleswoman". Since my comeback in Sunset Boulevard (1950), I'm glad to say they've thought up a new title: "Gloss".

[on Erich von Stroheim] The experience of working with him was unlike any I had had in more than 50 pictures. He was so painstaking and slow that I would lose all sense of time, hypnotized by the man's relentless perfectionism.

[In a 1965 interview with DeWitt Bodeen] The public didn't want the truth, and I shouldn't have bothered to give it to them. In those days they wanted us to live like kings. So we did--and why not? We were in love with life. We were making more money than we ever dreamed existed, and there was no reason to believe it would ever stop.

Two of the more trivial topics I never discuss are my marriage [of three weeks] to Wallace Beery and those frozen dinners which have become famous with my name on them.

[on being transported by police through a mob of fans to the premiere of The Trespasser (1929)] As I felt my feet leave the ground, I could tell that someone behind me was standing on my train, so I screamed for one of the horsemen to pick it up. I was now completely horizontal, face down, like a battering ram, and that is the way they carried me through the crowd and into the theater lobby.

Under God we became the freest, strongest, wealthiest nation on earth. Should we change that?

[on showing pictures of herself] You notice there are NO bathing beauty scenes? And I'll tell you why: I was never a Sennet bathing beauty. Those glossies that sometimes turn up were publicity stills that I unfortunately made as a favor when I had a free hour. And I've paid for it all of my life.

They won't ever let me forget Sunset Boulevard (1950). Maybe I shouldn't have done it. These people who watch the film now never heard of me. They weren't alive when I did silent films. They think I was Norma Desmond, and I keep telling them Norma Desmond was a creation, not a real character. I NEVER was Norma Desmond, and I don't know anyone who lived like that!

I haven't a very great sense of humor. When I see a comedy I laugh with the others. I'm sufficiently amused, but when it's over I have a feeling that I am not taking anything away with me. I don't think that comedy, unless it has a great deal of irony in it, corresponds to anything in life. It makes me feel vacant - just as though I had gone to a restaurant hungry and come away without eating.

[during the first screening of The Impossible Mrs. Bellew (1922)} Did we make that on location or in the studio?

[To Michel Drucker, presenter, in "Champs Elysees" program in Paris, 1981] I don't wanna be remembered as Norma Desmond, the woman in that tragedy; I wanna be remembered as a comedian, who made people laugh.

I started carrying a carnation as a way to help me quit smoking; it has become my signature.

Why do men always call a carnation a "rose"?