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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I feel sure that unborn babies pick their parents.

I became a fanatic about healthy food in 1944.

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

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

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

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

I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.

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

Every victory is also a defeat.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I always anticipated difficulties in order to avoid scenes.

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.

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

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

I am a very pragmatic person.

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

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

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

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

Nobody gets anything for nothing.

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

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

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

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

As Daddy said, life is 95 percent anticipation.

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

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