- 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"?
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