Quotes

Strip the phony tinsel off Hollywood and you'll find the real tinsel underneath.

I made a comment to a newspaper about therapists saying that people should not become dependent on them and it got printed as, "The rapists say . . . "

My psychiatrist once said to me, "Maybe life isn't for everyone".

A musical is a series of catastrophes ending with a floor show.

In some situations I was difficult, in odd moments impossible, in rare moments loathsome, but at my best unapproachably great.

I'm a controversial figure. My friends either dislike me or hate me.

I hate cold showers. They stimulate me, and then I don't know what to do.

[to his friend George Gershwin] Tell me, George, if you had it to do over, would you fall in love with yourself again?

Happiness isn't something you experience; it's something you remember.

I am no more humble than my talents require.

I envy people who drink. At least they have something to blame everything on.

The only difference between the Democrats and the Republicans is that the Democrats allow the poor to be corrupt, too.

There's a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.

I admire Leonard Bernstein, but not as much as he does. Lennie has no humor about his egomania. I do.

I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin.

[on Perry Como] I'm convinced that his voice comes out of his eyelids.

It's not what you are but what you don't become that hurts.

[on Steve Allen] When I can't sleep, I read a book by Steve Allen.

I smile so seldom that I wonder at Arlene Francis, who smiles persistently. Like the Sorceror's Apprentice, once she turns it on can she turn it off?

When I was young, I looked like Al Capone but I lacked his compassion.

Today I'm a neurotic basket case. My health is so bad that I might as well be the next Premier of India.

[on Orson Welles] Sometimes he was inaudible--those were his best moments.

[on his role in Rhythm on the River (1940)] I played an unsympathetic part--myself.

[about his first meeting with Marilyn Monroe] I said something to her and Jean Peters questioned my grammar. That was one of the nadir points of my career, to have my grammar corrected in front of Marilyn Monroe.

I have given up reading books. I find it takes my mind off myself.

Schizophrenia beats dining alone.

What the world needs is more geniuses with humility. There are so few of us left.

An evening with [George Gershwin] was a Gershwin evening. There were recurrent lengthy references to his piano playing, his composing, his conducting, his painting--marcato monologues in alla breve, which George's audiences absorbed with the fascinating attentiveness of a Storm-trooper listening to one of [Adolf Hitler's] well-modulated firehouse chats.

Geo. Gershwin: I wonder if my music will be played in a hundred years' time? Oscar: If you're still around, George, it will be.

My last picture for Warners was Romance on the High Seas. It was Doris Day's first picture; that was before she became a virgin.

Now that Marilyn Monroe is kosher, Arthur Miller can eat her.