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

Success only breeds a new goal

My passions were all gathered together like fingers that made a fist. Drive is considered aggression today; I knew it then as purpose.

I’ve lost my faith in science.

If everybody likes you, you’re pretty dull.

I may not have been wearing a mink coat, but I was traveling with a dog. That should have made you think I was an actress!

The best time I ever had with Joan Crawford was when I pushed her down the stairs in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?

I was the female Marlon Brando of my generation.

An affair now and then is good for a marriage. It adds spice, stops it from getting boring. I ought to know.

One can be respected with the truth in Hollywood just as much as anywhere else you know or else I wouldn’t have had a career.

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

I do not regret one professional enemy I have made. Any actor who doesn’t dare to make an enemy should get out of the business.

I’d marry again if I found a man who had fifteen million dollars, would sign over half to me, and guarantee that he’d be dead within a year.

I will not retire while I’ve still got my legs and my make-up box.

Playing our parts. Yes, we all have to do that and from childhood on, I have found that my own character has been much harder to play worthily and far harder at times to comprehend than any of the roles I have portrayed.

You can lose everything but you can’t lose your talent!

I’ve been lucky. I’ll be lucky again.

I need beaches, and blackness, and moonlit nakedness.

I’m the little half-black, half-Jewish girl who was odd and awkward. I try to be myself.

Only the foolish, blinded by language’s conventions, think of fire as red or gold. Fire is blue at it’s melancholy rim, green in it’s envious heart. It may burn white, or even, in it’s greatest rages, black.

Which is probably the reason why I work exclusively in black and white to highlight that contrast.

What seems to me white, I will believe black if the hierarchical Church so defines.

I do remember being teased by my cousins on my mom’s side for not being black enough. And then I’d spend the summer with my dad and be sent to all white summer camps where I was ‘that black girl.’

I’ve changed the way I look a bit but not intentionally. I’ve cut my hair. I’ve got a bit of pink in it and lately I’ve become a bit monochrome, wearing a lot of black and white.

Blue green orange red. I could eat all the colors of the rainbow and still see life in black-and-white reruns I’ve watched a thousand times. – rumination.