“You should know me well enough by now to know I don’t ask for things I don’t think I can get.”

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.

Strong women only marry weak men.

In this business, until you’re known as a monster you’re not a star.

I wanted to be the first to win three Oscars, but Miss Hepburn has done it. Actually it hasn’t been done. Miss Hepburn only won half an Oscar. If they’d given me half an Oscar I would have thrown it back in their faces. You see, I’m an Aries. I never lose.

ACT as men of thought; THINK as men of action.

I’d rather know what you’re thinking – even if what you’re thinking is insane.

You know, most people, they want to go to Hollywood. They want to be a star. They want to be a rock star. That thought never entered any of our minds, the Van Halen family.

I think everybody has their own way of looking at their lives as some kind of pilgrimage. Some people will see their role as a pilgrim in terms of setting up a fine family, or establishing a business inheritance. Everyone’s got their own definition.

I think that’s become passe, but if you can surround yourself with a kind of monument to yourself and your family – a statement – and you can afford it, then that’s a noble project.

Sometimes I feel like I’m actually on the wrong planet. It’s great when I’m in my garden, but the minute I go out the gate I think, ‘What the hell am I doing here?

I think everything you do, characters I always find, have their own voices and once you establish who that character is you find a different voice. I think it’s just a question of establishing that character and the voice speaks through that character.

I get all these screenplays that start ‘Tawnya is in the shower. The water streams down her naked, perky breasts’. I don’t think this is happening to Natalie Portman.