“I have been uncompromising, peppery, intractable, monomaniacal, tactless, volatile, and oftentimes disagreeable. I suppose I’m larger than life.”

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.

The act of sex, gratifying as it may be, is God’s joke on humanity. It is man’s last desperate stand at superintendency.

It’s true we don’t know what we’ve got until its gone, but we don’t know what we’ve been missing until it arrives. Pleasure of love lasts but a moment, Pain of love lasts a lifetime.

I regard writing not as an investigation of character but as an exercise in the use of language, and with this I am obsessed.

Any fool can fight a winning battle, but it needs character to fight a losing one, and that should inspire us; which reminds me that I dreamed the other night that I was being hanged, but was the life and soul of the party.

Few men realize that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings.

Most men like in women what is most opposite their own characters.

Firmness in enduring and exertion is a character I always wish to possess. I have always despised the whining yelp of complaint and cowardly resolve.

Revision has its own peculiar pleasures and its own peculiar frustrations. The ground rules are already established; the characters already exist. You don’t have to bring the characters to life, but you do have to make them more convincing.

Of the many smells of Athens two seem to me the most characteristic – that of garlic, bold and deadly like acetylene gas. and that of dust, soft and warm and caressing like tweed.

Spirituality helps develop good character. It is character that shines bright when words fail to do so.