Gloria Swanson Quotes

Key West for me was a tropical island paradise.

I feel sure that unborn babies pick their parents.

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

I've given my memoirs far more thought than any of my marriages. You can't divorce a book.

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

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

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

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

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

Nobody gets anything for nothing.

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

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

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.

Much as I cared for Joseph Kennedy, he was a classic example of that person in the arts with lots of brains and drive but little taste or talent.

I became a fanatic about healthy food in 1944.

As Daddy said, life is 95 percent anticipation.

My mother and I could always look out the same window without ever seeing the same thing.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

I consider anybody who weighs over 200 pounds fat, and time was when I could not refrain from telling such people so.

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

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

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

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

It's amazing to find that so many people, who I thought really knew me, could have thought that 'Sunset Boulevard' was autobiographical. I've got nobody floating in my swimming pool.

My greatest debt will always be to the movie-going public of yesterday and today, without whose love and devotion I would have had no story to tell.

The day I initiated divorce proceedings against Michael Farmer, I was ready to retire to a desert cave and rethink my life.

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

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

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.

I entered the cosmetics industry because I wanted more women to use cosmetics made with safe, healthful ingredients.

I always anticipated difficulties in order to avoid scenes.

I was married when I was 17. I knew nothing. I was full of romance.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

My sculpture is very personal; for years my subjects were family and close, close friends.

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

The English press treated the world premiere of my first talking picture as a major event.

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

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