Old age is no place for sissies.
Bette Davis
Oh, don't let's ask for the moon. We've already got the stars.
I'd luv to kiss ya, but I just washed my hair.
The key to life is accepting challenges. Once someone stops doing this, he's dead.
Attempt the impossible in order to improve your work.
If you've never been hated by your child, you've never been a parent.
I'd marry again if I found a man who had fifteen million dollars, would sign over half to me, and guarantee that he'd be dead within a year.
To fulfill a dream, to be allowed to sweat over lonely labor, to be given a chance to create, is the meat and potatoes of life. The money is the gravy.
Without wonder and insight, acting is just a trade. With it, it becomes creation.
My passions were all gathered together like fingers that made a fist. Drive is considered aggression today; I knew it then as purpose.
This has always been a motto of mine: Attempt the impossible in order to improve your work.
Basically, I believe the world is a jungle, and if it's not a bit of a jungle in the home, a child cannot possibly be fit to enter the outside world.
A sure way to lose happiness, I found, is to want it at the expense of everything else.
The best time I ever had with Joan Crawford was when I pushed her down the stairs in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
Sex is God's joke on human beings.
Strong women only marry weak men.
In this business, until you're known as a monster you're not a star.
Life is a jest; and all things show it. I thought so once; but now I know it.
Acting should be bigger than life. Scripts should be bigger than life. It should all be bigger than life.
From the moment I was six I felt sexy. And let me tell you it was hell, sheer hell, waiting to do something about it.
Wave after wave of love flooded the stage and washed over me, the beginning of the one great durable romance of my life.
I am doomed to an eternity of compulsive work. No set goal achieved satisfies. Success only breeds a new goal. The golden apple devoured has seeds. It is endless.
Gay Liberation? I ain't against it, it's just that there's nothing in it for me.
I work to stay alive.
Hollywood always wanted me to be pretty, but I fought for realism.
There are new words now that excuse everybody. Give me the good old days of heroes and villains, the people you can bravo or hiss. There was a truth to them that all the slick credulity of today cannot touch.
To look back is to relax one's vigil.
Men become much more attractive when they start looking older. But it doesn't do much for women, though we do have an advantage: make-up.
I am just too much.
I don't take the movies seriously, and anyone who does is in for a headache.
Everybody has a heart. Except some people.
That's me: an old kazoo with some sparklers.
I've lost my faith in science.
Psychoanalysis. Almost went three times - almost. Then I decided what was peculiar about me was probably what made me successful. I've seen some very talented actors go into analysis and really lose it.
It is my last wish to be burried sitting up.
I will not retire while I've still got my legs and my make-up box.
I survived because I was tougher than anybody else.
With the newspaper strike on, I wouldn't consider dying.
I do not regret one professional enemy I have made. Any actor who doesn't dare to make an enemy should get out of the business.
I was never very interested in boys - and there were plenty of them - vying with one another to see how many famous women they would get into the hay.
I never did pal around with actresses. Their talk usually bored me to tears.
People often become actresses because of something they dislike about themselves: They pretend they are someone else.
I often think that a slightly exposed shoulder emerging from a long satin nightgown packs more sex than two naked bodies in bed.
Today everyone is a star - they're all billed as 'starring' or 'also starring'. In my day, we earned that recognition.
Good actors I've worked with all started out making faces in a mirror, and you keep making faces all your life.
I will never be below the title.
I sent my flowers across the hall to Mrs Nixon but her husband remembered what a Democrat I am and sent them back.
I've always liked men better than women.
An affair now and then is good for a marriage. It adds spice, stops it from getting boring... I ought to know.
In this rat-race everybody's guilty till proved innocent!
