Gene Tierney quotes:

Life is a little like a message in a bottle, to be carried by the winds and the tides.

Cars, furs, and gems were not my weaknesses.

Hollywood can be hard on women, but it did not cause my problems.

Children don't understand about people loving each other and then suddenly not.

I do not recall spending long hours in front of a mirror loving my reflection.

I'm not sure I can explain the nature of Jack Kennedy's charm, but he took life just as it came.

Trying to make order out of my life was like trying to pick up a jellyfish.

When you have spent an important part of your life playing Let's Pretend, it's often easy to see symbolism where none exists.

Those who become mentally ill often have a history of chronic pain.

Men are wonderful. I adore them. They always give you the benefit of the doubt.

There were days that I worked all the time, without a layoff, or a rest, finishing one picture and reporting for another sometimes on the same day.

Some women feel the best cure for a broken heart is a new beau.

I had been offered a Hollywood contract before my 18th birthday. It gave me the spark I needed.

What a different world it was when I first sailed for Europe in 1930, with my mother, sister, and brother to spend six months abroad.

I remember the 1940s as a time when we were united in a way known only to that generation. We belonged to a common cause-the war.

When my mood was high, I seemed normal, even buoyant. I felt smarter. I had secrets. I could see God in a light bulb.

My mother would not talk to me for weeks, would not stay under my roof for as long as I was married to Oleg.

As an actress, I was trained to show emotion I did not feel, or no emotion at all.

I dated dozens of young men, had fun with all, made commitments to none.

Wealth, beauty, and fame are transient. When those are gone, little is left except the need to be useful.

We cannot calculate the numbers of people who left, fled or were fished out of Europe just ahead of the Holocaust.

The word actress has always seemed less a job description to me than a title.

Day after day, I spent long afternoons in the talent pool, being told how to walk, how to talk, how to sit.

The Hollywood structure was monopolistic, run by four or five big studios.

It is difficult to write about any form of mental disease, especially your own, without sounding as if you were examining a bug under glass.

I knew I could not cope with the future unless I was able to rediscover the past.

I needed to be accepted, not humored. I intended to act.

I am not the kind of woman who excuses her mistakes while reminding us of what used to be.

In my early days in Hollywood I tried to be economical. I designed my own clothes, much to my mother's distress.

I had no romantic interest in Gable. I considered him an older man.

My departure from Hollywood was described as a walk-out. No one understood that I was cracking up.

I was fortunate enough to work under directors who were, most of them, brilliant, emotional men.

I used to annoy my father by telling him how much I felt luck was with me.

Throughout my career, I was to be cast as a frontier girl, an aristocrat, an Arabian, a Eurasian, a Polynesian, and a Chinese.

When my mood was high, I seemed normal, even buoyant. I felt smarter. I had secrets. I could see God in a light bulb

I learned quickly at Columbia that the only eye that mattered was the one on the camera.

Movie failures are like the common cold. You can stay in bed and take aspirin for six days and recover. Or you can walk around and ignore it for six days and recover.

I was plunged into what was known as the debutante social whirl. This was one of the ways fathers justified their own hard work and sacrifices.

The word actress has always seemed less a job description to me than a title

Eccentric behavior is not routinely noticed around a movie set.

I followed the same diet for 20 years, eliminating starches, living on salads, lean meat, and small portions.

In later years, I craved foods that were almost always fattening.

Jealousy is, I think, the worst of all faults because it makes a victim of both parties.

I approached everything, my job, my family, my romances, with intensity.

When I met Jack Kennedy, he was a serious young man with a dream. He was not a womanizer, not as I understood the term.

I ask myself: Would I have been any worse off if I had stayed home or lived on a farm instead of shock treatments and medication?

I never understood the theory, once popular among doctors, that blamed mental disorders on too little or too much mother love. My own mother was my darling.

Houses are one of my passions. I probably should have been an interior decorator.

The Howard Hughes I knew began to change after his plane crash in 1941.

The main cause of my difficulties stemmed from the tragedy of my daughter's unsound birth and my inability to face my feelings.

I was going to live on my salary or go down swinging.

Rehearsals and screening rooms are often unreliable because they can't provide the chemistry between an audience and what appears on the stage or screen.

Chaplin was notoriously strict with his sons and rarely gave them spending money.

Everyone should see Hollywood once, I think, through the eyes of a teenage girl who has just passed a screen test.

In the months leading up to World War II, there was a tendency among many Americans to talk absently about the trouble in Europe. Nothing that happened an ocean away seemed very threatening.

I had known Cole Porter in Hollywood and New York, spent many a warm hour at his home, and met the talented and original people who were drawn to him.

Fonda and Gary Cooper had the best sense of timing of all the actors I knew.

I loved to eat. For all of Hollywood's rewards, I was hungry for most of those 20 years.

I hole up now and then and do nothing for days but read.

A flame burns brightest just before it goes out.

A romantic, I think, picks the rose and is careless with the thorn.

About my career I was serious and earnest, sometimes impatient.

For years it never occurred to me to question the judgment of those in charge at the studio.

I admire anyone who rids himself of an addiction.

I existed in a world that never is - the prison of the mind.

I had been introduced to psychotherapy, in which the doctors let you talk, talk, talk, until you find the source of your problem or find another doctor.

I have a role now that I think becomes me. I am a grandmother.

I simply did not want my face to be my talent.

I used up every cent I earned as an actress.

I was fine when it came to cheering up others, not so fine with myself.

I was not cut out to be a rebel.

In show business the saying seems too often true: it isn't enough to succeed; someone else must fail.

It was the fashion of the time, still is, to feel that all actors are neurotic, or they would not be actors.

Joe Schenck, a top 20th Century-Fox executive, once said to me that he really believed I had a future, and that was because I was the only girl who could survive so many bad pictures.

Nothing strengthens a woman's determination to be in love quite so much as being told that she cannot.

that strange conflict in the American character: we pride ourselves on being the melting pot of the world but we insist on regarding most immigrants with suspicion.

The things we ignore often come back to us in our sleep.

Unlike the stage, I never found it helpful to be good in a bad movie.

we Irish don't really need thousands of people surging behind a big brass band to have a parade. One guitar player and a few people whistling will do the job.

Where there is hope, there is no despair.

My parents argued more than I remembered, about money and all the little things that disguise the truth that you are still arguing about money.

there are many ways to fail. Some reject success. And others do not recognize it when success comes.