Quotes

I learned at a very early age that life is a battle. My family was poor, my neighborhood was poor. The only way that I could get away from the awfulness of life, at that time, was at the movies. There I decided that my big aim was to make money. And it was there that I became a very determined woman.

I never thought of myself as a movie star. I'm just a working girl. A working girl who worked her way to the top--and never fell off.

My life is fair game for anybody. I spent an unhappy, penniless childhood in Brooklyn. I had to slug my way up in a town called Hollywood where people love to trample you to death. I don't relax because I don't know how. I don't want to know how. Life is too short to relax.

When you're dead, you're dead. No one is going to remember me when I'm dead. Oh, maybe a few friends will remember me affectionately. Being remembered isn't the most important thing, anyhow. It's what you do when you are here that's important.

You aim at all the things you have been told that stardom means--the rich life, the applause, the parties cluttered with celebrities. Then you find that you have it all. And it is nothing, really nothing. It is like a drug that lasts just a few hours, a sleeping pill. When it wears off, you have to live without its help.

[to Darryl F. Zanuck's request that she attend the Academy Awards ceremony, 1952] I attended twice and I lost twice and I had to explain to some of those vultures who had been dying for me to lose how "there'll always be a next day". Well, I'm not going to make a TV spectacle of myself in front of a few million viewers and that's that!