Gloria Swanson quotes:

Writing the story of your own life is a bit like drilling your own teeth.

Sunset Boulevard opened in August 1950, and it was pronounced the best movie ever made about Hollywood.

Tennessee Williams was a gifted talker with a beautiful accent and we had lots of things in common.

I've given my memoirs far more thought than any of my marriages. You can't divorce a book.

Sam Wood, the director, made most of his money as a real estate agent; there was nothing of the temperamental artist about him.

We lived on the Key West Army Base. Key West for me was a tropical island paradise.

All creative people should be required to leave California for three months every year.

When I die, my epitaph should read: She Paid the Bills. That's the story of my private life.

As Daddy said, life is 95 percent anticipation.

I entered the cosmetics industry because I wanted more women to use cosmetics made with safe, healthful ingredients.

The day I initiated divorce proceedings against Michael Farmer, I was ready to retire to a desert cave and rethink my life.

My sculpture is very personal; for years my subjects were family and close, close friends.

Life and death. They are somehow sweetly and beautifully mixed, but I don't know how.

Because I take care of my body, it doesn't look like the body of a woman of my years.

After 16 years in pictures I could not be intimidated easily, because I knew where all the skeletons were buried.

I feel sure that unborn babies pick their parents.

My greatest debt will always be to the movie-going public of yesterday and today, without whose love and devotion I would have had no story to tell.

Much as I cared for Joseph Kennedy, he was a classic example of that person in the arts with lots of brains and drive but little taste or talent.

I consider anybody who weighs over 200 pounds fat, and time was when I could not refrain from telling such people so.

I doubted that there were Communists hiding behind every corporation desk and director's chair.

All they had to do was put my name on a marquee and watch the money roll in.

I became a fanatic about healthy food in 1944.

Never say never, for if you live long enough, chances are you will not be able to abide by the simplest of such injunctions.

Never say never Never is a long, undependable time, and life is too full of rich possibilities to have restrictions placed upon it.

The Sennett system of making pictures was actually fun. You never knew what the person next to you was going to do.

The major gossip columnists were more concerned with protecting the industry than with gunning down sinners.

The English press treated the world premiere of my first talking picture as a major event.

My mother and I could always look out the same window without ever seeing the same thing.

From the first moment on the set I was consumed with curiousity about the technical side of shooting a sound picture.

The first feminine feature that goes, with advancing age, is the neck.

Fame was thrilling only until it became grueling. Money was fun only until you ran out of things to buy.

At 26 I felt myself a victim rather than a victor in the realm of pictures.

One of the networks sent me a TV set to watch. I didn't care for the medium. It depressed me.

The Paramount executives were so pleased with Sunset Boulevard that they asked me to do a publicity tour.

It's amazing to find that so many people, who I thought really knew me, could have thought that 'Sunset Boulevard' was autobiographical. I've got nobody floating in my swimming pool.

I am a very pragmatic person.

Key West for me was a tropical island paradise.

I always anticipated difficulties in order to avoid scenes.

I had starred in more than 30 successful films, six in a row directed by Cecil B. De Mille.

The only time I ever went hunting I remembered it as a grisly experience.

In two months Joseph Kennedy had taken over my entire life, and I trusted him implicitly to make the most of it.

I didn't want to spend the rest of my life playing Norma Desmond over and over again.

Your body is the direct result of what you eat as well as what you don't eat.

There was no place at all for me in my father's military world.

By the time I was 15, my mother had turned me into a real clotheshorse.

Hollywood's old trick: repeat a successful formula until it dies.

I have gone through a long apprenticeship. I have gone through enough of being a nobody. I have decided that when I am a star, I will be every inch and every moment the star! Everybody from the studio gateman to the highest executive will know it.

I think all this talk about age is foolish. Every time I'm one year older, everyone else is too.

I was 25 and the most popular celebrity in the world, with the possible exception of my friend Mary Pickford.

I was married when I was 17. I knew nothing. I was full of romance.

I was the first celebrity in pictures to be marrying a titled European.

If you're 40 years old and you've never had a failure, you've been deprived.

In a theater you can fool everyone past the tenth row if you're good, but on the screen you can't really fool anyone for a second.

Nobody gets anything for nothing.

Nobody gets something for nothing.

So they were turning, after all - those cameras. Life, which can be strangely merciful, had taken pity on Norma Desmond. The dream she had clung to so desperately had enfolded her. Norma: You see, this is my life. It always will be! (In a whisper) There's nothing else - just us - and the cameras - and those wonderful people out there in the dark. All right, Mr. De Mille, I'm ready for my close-up.

The fuss that actors began making about the difficulty of shifting to sound struck me as perfectly foolish.