Quotes

A painter paints, a musician plays, a writer writes - but a movie actor waits.

I was never totally involved in movies. I was just making my father's dream come true.

It's not good to make sentimental journeys. You see the differences instead of the sameness.

[on her early Hollywood roles] I was as two-dimensional as the screen itself: cool, indifferent, looking lovely in close-ups. Period. Period. Period. When was I ever going to learn to act? You can't learn if you can't experiment and find out what works and doesn't work. But the hours are long, the schedule rigid, so I did what I was told and saved time and money for the front office. And got a lot of jobs that way.

Once you start asking questions, innocence is gone.

A person without memory is either a child or an amnesiac. A country without memory is neither a child nor an amnesiac, but neither is it a country.

[on George S. Kaufman] He was the kind of man I'd go over a cliff for.

There are five stages in the life of an actor: Who's Mary Astor? Get me Mary Astor. Get me a Mary Astor Type. Get me a young Mary Astor. Who's Mary Astor?

At Metro, you practically had to go to the front office if you wanted something as real as having your hair mussed. All automobiles were shiny, a picture never hung crooked, a door never squeaked, stocking seams were always straight and no actress ever had a shiny nose.

I was never totally involved in movies. I was making someone else's dream come true. Not mine.

[on her Little Women (1949) co-stars] The girls all giggled and chattered and made a game of every scene. Taylor [Elizabeth Taylor] was engaged, and in love, and talking on the telephone most of the time (which is fine normally, but not when the production clock is ticking away the company's money). June Allyson chewed gum constantly and irritatingly, and Maggie O'Brien [Margaret O'Brien] looked at me as though she were planning something very unpleasant.

I admire nudity and I like sex, and so did a lot of people in the '30s. But, to me, overexposure blunts the fun. Sex as something beautiful may soon disappear. Once it was a knife so finely honed the edge was invisible until it was touched and then it cut deep. Now it is so blunt that it merely bruises and leaves ugly marks. Nudity is fine in the privacy of my own bedroom with the appropriate partner. Or for a model in life class at art school. Or as portrayed in stone and paint. But I don't like it used as a joke or to titillate. Or be so bloody frank about.

[on Greta Garbo] I don't think Garbo with her clothes off, panting in a brass bed, would have been more sexy than she was.