Gloria Swanson Quotes

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

So they were turning, after all - those cameras. Life, which can be strangely merciful, had taken pity on Norma Desmond. The dream she had clung to so desperately had enfolded her. Norma: You see, this is my life. It always will be! (In a whisper) There's nothing else - just us - and the cameras - and those wonderful people out there in the dark. All right, Mr. De Mille, I'm ready for my close-up.

Your body is the direct result of what you eat as well as what you don't eat.

One of the networks sent me a TV set to watch. I didn't care for the medium. It depressed me.

I always anticipated difficulties in order to avoid scenes.

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

There was no place at all for me in my father's military world.

The Paramount executives were so pleased with Sunset Boulevard that they asked me to do a publicity tour.

Sunset Boulevard opened in August 1950, and it was pronounced the best movie ever made about Hollywood.

The major gossip columnists were more concerned with protecting the industry than with gunning down sinners.

Never say never, for if you live long enough, chances are you will not be able to abide by the simplest of such injunctions.

I didn't want to spend the rest of my life playing Norma Desmond over and over again.

Writing the story of your own life is a bit like drilling your own teeth.

In a theater you can fool everyone past the tenth row if you're good, but on the screen you can't really fool anyone for a second.

Never say never Never is a long, undependable time, and life is too full of rich possibilities to have restrictions placed upon it.

If you're 40 years old and you've never had a failure, you've been deprived.

The first feminine feature that goes, with advancing age, is the neck.

Nobody gets anything for nothing.

As Daddy said, life is 95 percent anticipation.

Hollywood's old trick: repeat a successful formula until it dies.

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

I had starred in more than 30 successful films, six in a row directed by Cecil B. De Mille.

The Sennett system of making pictures was actually fun. You never knew what the person next to you was going to do.

I doubted that there were Communists hiding behind every corporation desk and director's chair.

In two months Joseph Kennedy had taken over my entire life, and I trusted him implicitly to make the most of it.

Sam Wood, the director, made most of his money as a real estate agent; there was nothing of the temperamental artist about him.

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

The fuss that actors began making about the difficulty of shifting to sound struck me as perfectly foolish.

Life and death. They are somehow sweetly and beautifully mixed, but I don't know how.

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.

From the first moment on the set I was consumed with curiousity about the technical side of shooting a sound picture.

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

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

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

Fame was thrilling only until it became grueling. Money was fun only until you ran out of things to buy.

I was 25 and the most popular celebrity in the world, with the possible exception of my friend Mary Pickford.

Nobody gets something for nothing.

Tennessee Williams was a gifted talker with a beautiful accent and we had lots of things in common.

Because I take care of my body, it doesn't look like the body of a woman of my years.

The only time I ever went hunting I remembered it as a grisly experience.