“I have been at war from the beginning. I’ve never looked back before. I’ve never had the time and it has always seemed so dangerous. To look back is to relax one’s vigil.”

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.

Let’s begin creating miracles now.

The peoples of the Mediterranean began to emerge from barbarism when they learned to cultivate the olive and the vine.

The moment we begin to celebrate ourselves and focus on our successes is the moment we begin living.

When you choose to perceive Love over fear, life begins to flow.

When one begins to think about it, America depends rather heavily on women’s passive dependence, their femininity. Femininity, if one still wants to call it that, makes American women a target and a victim of the sexual sell.

Life is the beginning of death. Life is for the sake of death. Death is at once the end and the beginning—at once separation and closer union of the self. Through death the reduction is complete.

When she stopped conforming to the conventional picture of femininity she finally began to enjoy being a woman.

When a peasant begins to feel the need for instruction, he usually becomes fiercely calculating.