“One begins to realize that one is getting old when the birthday candles weigh more than the cake.”

You know what I’m going to have on my gravestone? ‘She did it the hard way.’

If everyone likes you, you’re not doing it right.

Everybody has a heart. Except some people.

If everybody likes you, you are not a very interesting person.

You’ve got to know someone pretty well to hate them.

Good actors I’ve worked with all started out making faces in a mirror, and you keep making faces all your life.

I’ve always liked men better than women.

You should never say bad things about the dead, you should only say good, Joan Crawford is dead. Good.

Pleasure of love lasts but a moment, Pain of love lasts a lifetime.

There are new words now that excuse everybody. Give me the good old days of heroes and villains, the people you can bravo or hiss. There was a truth to them that all the slick credulity of today cannot touch.

I was thought to be ‘stuck up.’ I wasn’t. I was just sure of myself. This is and always has been an unforgivable quality to the unsure.

At 50, I thought proudly: Here we are, half century! Being 60 was fairly frightening. You want to know how I spent my 70th birthday? I put on a completely black face, a fuzzy black Afro wig, wore black clothes and hung a black wreath on my door.

Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy night! – As Margo Channing in All About Eve

I work to stay alive.

I was never very interested in boys – and there were plenty of them – vying with one another to see how many famous women they would get into the hay.

Success is built on disappointment, and disappointment is inherent in all success.

A woman has the age she deserves.

Relationships are like Rome – difficult to start out, incredible during the prosperity of the ‘golden age’, and unbearable during the fall.

Who acts, shall endure. So speaks the voice of the age-old wisdom.

A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman’s birthday but never remembers her age.

From the age of three, I played every day-morning, afternoon and night.

You’re never too old, too wacky, too wild, to pick up a book and read to a child.

The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.

At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.