Montgomery Clift Quotes

Failure and its accompanying misery is for the artist his most vital source of creative energy.

I don't want to be labeled as either a pansy or a heterosexual. Labeling is so self-limiting. We are what we do - not what we say we are.

The closer we come to the negative, to death, the more we blossom.

I have the same problem as Marilyn. We attract people the way honey does bees, but they're generally the wrong kind of people. People who want something from us - if only our energy. We need a period of being alone to become ourselves.

Look, I'm not odd. I'm just trying to be an actor; not a movie star, an actor.

Nobody ever lies about being lonely.

Noah, from 'The Young Lions' (1958), was the best performance of my life. I couldn't have given more of myself. I'll never be able to do it again. Never.

If a man don't go his own way, he is nothing.

Look, if you're playing Romeo and your Juliet is a pig, you find something you can love about pigs!

James Dean's death had a profound effect on me. The instant I heard about it, I vomited. I don't know why.

A man should be what he can do.

The thing that bugs me is the average woman's complete ignorance of the functional purpose of cosmetics, which is to supplement, not conceal.

I keep my family out of my public life because it can be an awful nuisance to them. What's my mother going to tell strangers anyway? That I was a cute baby and that she's terribly proud of me? Nuts. Who cares?

The sadness of our existence should not leave us blunted, on the contrary--how to remain thin-skinned, vulnerable and stay alive?

Look! Look! If you look really hard at things you'll forget you're going to die.

The only line that's wrong in Shakespeare is 'holding a mirror up to nature.' You hold a magnifying glass up to nature. As an actor you just enlarge it enough so that your audience can identify with the situation. If it were a mirror, we would have no art.

I have enough money to get by. I'm not independently wealthy, just independently lazy, I suppose.