"The harder I work, the luckier I get." Samuel Goldwyn
"Hollywood is a place where people from Iowa mistake each other for stars." Fred Allen
"Insanity runs in my family. It practically gallops." Cary Grant
"I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions." Lillian Hellman
"It serves me right for putting all my eggs in one bastard." Dorothy Parker
“Attitude is more important than the past, than education, than money, than circumstances, than what people do or say. It is more important than appearance, giftedness, or skill.” W.C. Fields
"Carrie is my child, and I love her with every ounce of strength I possess. If love alone could cure our children, they would always be well. Since I can’t, I will do whatever I can to make her life less difficult." Debbie Reynolds
"I was street smart, but unfortunately the street was Rodeo Drive." Carrie Fisher
“Getting divorced just because you don’t love a man is almost as silly as getting married just because you do.” Zsa Zsa Gabor
"I have the terrible feeling that, because I am wearing a white beard and am sitting in the back of the theatre, you expect me to tell you the truth about something. These are the cheap seats, not Mount Sinai." Orson Welles
"I just tried to remember the lyrics and not bump into the trumpet player." Jo Stafford (on her stage technique)
"I can make a case that I regret nothing. After all, most of my mistakes turned out to be things I survived, or turned into funny stories, or, on occasion, even made money from." Nora Ephron
"I'm not a film star, I am an actress. Being a film star is such a false life, lived for fake values and for publicity." Vivien Leigh
"I certainly do not drink all the time. I have to sleep, you know." W. C. Fields
"I never was that boy who loved gangster films, but when I was growing up, I was obsessed with the detective Dick Tracy. It was one of my favorite movies as a kid, and he really inspired me. I would have loved to be part of that golden age of Hollywood in the 1940s. It made me want to become an actor." Ryan Gosling
"I never lose sight of the fact that just being is fun." Katherine Hepburn
"A hunch is creativity trying to tell you something." Frank Capra
"If it isn't the sheriff, it's the finance company; I've got more attachments on me than a vacuum cleaner." John Barrymore
"When you are a mother, you are never really alone in your thoughts. A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her child." Sophia Loren
"Life is like an onion: You peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep." Carl Laemmle
"Life is not a having and a getting, but a being and a becoming." Myrna Loy
"A man is not old until regrets take the place of dreams." John Barrymore
"Cultivate solitude and quiet and a few sincere friends, rather than mob merriment, noise and thousands of nodding acquaintances." William Powell
"It's the friends you can call up at 4 a.m. that matter." Marlene Dietrich
"You can speak well if... you can deliver the message of your heart." John Ford
"Nothing is permanent in this wicked world - not even our troubles!" Charlie Chaplin
"To truly laugh, you must be able to take your pain, and play with it!" Charlie Chaplin
"A day without laughter is a day wasted." Charlie Chaplin
"Failure is unimportant. It takes courage to make a fool of yourself." Charlie Chaplin
"When Gene was 13, his father abandoned the family for years with just a wave of the hand to his son playing in the street. 'It was a real adios,' says Hackman. 'It was so precise. Maybe that’s why I became an actor. I doubt I would have become so sensitive to human behavior if that hadn’t happened to me as a child—if I hadn’t realized how much one small gesture can mean.' "
From Richard Meryman's article, "Before They Were Kings," published in Vanity Fair (March 2004)
"Courage is being scared to death... and saddling up anyway." John Wayne
"In Hollywood the women are all peaches. It makes one long for an apple occasionally." W. Somerset Maugham
"So it can be seen that the trouble with the motion picture art was (and is) that it is too much an industry; and the trouble with the motion picture industry is that it is too much an art. It is out of this basic contradiction that most of the ills of the form arise." Garson Kanin
"As is the case with all original creators, Charles Chaplin's working life was an amalgam of arrogant self-confidence and deflating self-doubt." Garson Kanin
"'Great,' said Fred. 'And what's a greased pole got to do with it?' 'He probably meant greased pig,' mused George. 'No, no,' said Marx. 'He meant pole. You don't climb up a greased pig.' 'You might,' said George, 'if you were Goldwyn.'"
From Hollywood by Garson Kanin
"It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not." Marilyn Monroe
"I believe that everything happens for a reason. People change so that you can learn to let go, things go wrong so that you appreciate them when they're right, you believe lies so you eventually learn to trust no one but yourself, and sometimes good things fall apart so better things can fall together." Marilyn Monroe
"I was born at the age of twelve on an MGM lot." Judy Garland
"Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius, and it's better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring." Marilyn Monroe
"Bill Powell is the only intelligent actor I've ever met." Carole Lombard
"My doctor told me to stop having intimate dinners for four. Unless there are three other people." Orson Welles
"I must say I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go to the library and read a good book." Groucho Marx
"Someone said to me, 'If fifty percent of the experts in Hollywood said you had no talent and should give up, what would you do?' My answer was then and still is, 'If a hundred percent told me that, all one hundred percent would be wrong." Marilyn Monroe
"Most of all I want to thank my father, up there - the man who, when I said I wanted to be an actor said, 'Wonderful. Just have a back-up profession like welding.'" Robin Williams
"Life in the movie business is like the beginning of a new love affair: it's full of surprises, and you're constantly getting f**ked." David Mamet
"Strip away the phony tinsel of Hollywood and you'll find the real tinsel underneath." Oscar Levant
"I have to be careful to get out before I become the grotesque caricature of a hatchet-faced woman with big knockers." Jamie Lee Curtis
"Hollywood is a place where they'll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss, and fifty cents for your soul. I know because I turned down the first offer enough, and held out for the fifty cents." Marilyn Monroe
"If you have made mistakes, even serious ones, there is another chance for you. What we call failure is not the falling down, but the staying down." Mary Pickford
"There are only three ages for women in Hollywood: Babe, District Attorney, and Driving Miss Daisy." Goldie Hawn
"Hollywood is a place where they place you under contract, instead of under observation." Walter Winchell
"You can fool all the people all the time if the advertising is right and the budget is big enough." Joseph E Levine
"I read Shakespeare and the Bible, and I can shoot dice. That's what I call a liberal education." Tallulah Bankhead
“Each picture with its particular environment and unique personal relationships is a world unto itself – separate and distinct. Picture makers lead dozens of lives – a life for each picture. And, by the same token, they perish a little when each picture is finished and that world comes to an end. In this respect it is a melancholy occupation.” John Huston
"There have only been two authentic geniuses in the world, Willie Mays and Willie Shakespeare and I think you'd better put Shakespeare first, darling." Tallulah Bankhead
"They've great respect for the dead in Hollywood, but none for the living." Errol Flynn
"Every country gets the circus it deserves. Spain gets bullfights. Italy gets the Catholic Church. America gets Hollywood." Erica Jong quotes
"It's somehow symbolic of Hollywood that Tara was just a facade, with no rooms inside." David O. Selznick
"That [The Wizard of Oz] was my one big Hollywood hit, but, in a way, it hurt my picture career. After that, I was typecast as a lion, and there just weren't many parts for lions." Bert Lahr
"Whoever invented the meeting must have had Hollywood in mind. I think they should consider giving Oscars for meetings: Best Meeting of the Year, Best Supporting Meeting, Best Meeting Based on Material from Another Meeting." William Goldman
"Ah, stardom! They put your name on a star in the sidewalk on Hollywood Boulevard and you walk down and find a pile of dog manure on it. That tells the whole story, baby." Lee Marvin
"It's a scientific fact. For every year a person lives in Hollywood, they lose two points of their IQ." Truman Capote
"Hollywood is where they shoot too many pictures and not enough actors." Walter Winchell
"I look at going to Hollywood as going behind enemy lines. You parachute in, set up the explosion, then fly out before it goes off." Robert Redford
"I can't talk about Hollywood. It was a horror to me when I was there and it's a horror to look back on. I can't imagine how I did it. When I got away from it I couldn't even refer to the place by name. 'Out there,' I called it." Dorothy Parker
"If God doesn't destroy Hollywood Boulevard, he owes Sodom and Gomorrah an apology." Jay Leno
"I have been asked if I ever get the DTs; I don't know; it's hard to tell where Hollywood ends and the DTs begin." W.C. Fields
"You know, when I first went into the movies Lionel Barrymore played my grandfather. Later he played my father and finally he played my husband. If he had lived I'm sure I would have played his mother. That's the way it is in Hollywood. The men get younger and the women get older." Lillian Gish
"Much more frequent in Hollywood than the emergence of Cinderella is her sudden vanishing. At our party, even in those glowing days, the clock was always striking twelve for someone at the height of greatness; and there was never a prince to fetch her back to the happy scene." Ben Hecht
Wilson Mizner Quotes:
"Over in Hollywood they almost made a great picture, but they caught it just in time."
"The cuckoo who is on to himself is halfway out of the clock."
"Be nice to people on your way up because you'll meet them on your way down."
"Gambling: The sure way of getting nothing for something."
"There is something about a closet that makes a skeleton terribly restless."
"The most efficient water power in the world - women's tears."
"It is not in life, but in art that self-fulfillment is to be found."
"I respect faith, but doubt is what gives you an education."
"A fellow who is always declaring he's no fool usually has his suspicions."
"Life's a tough proposition, and the first hundred years are the hardest."
"A good listener is not only popular everywhere, but after a while, he knows something."
"Popularity is exhausting. The life of the party almost always winds up in a corner with an overcoat over him."
Some favorite "Goldwynisms" (Quotes by producer Sam Goldwyn):
"I'll tell you in two words: im possible!"
"I don't think anyone should write their autobiography until after they're dead."
"If I could drop dead right now, I'd be the happiest man alive."
"I've been laid up with intentional flu."
"Television has raised writing to a new low."
"You've got to take the bitter with the sour."
"No person who is enthusiastic about her work has anything to fear from life."
"The harder I work, the luckier I get."
"A verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's written on."
At the death of Louis B. Mayer: "The reason so many people showed up at his funeral is because they wanted to make sure he was dead."
The Wit and Wisdom of Robert Benchley:
"It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous."
"The only cure for a real hangover is death."
"Most of the arguments to which I am a party fall somewhat short of being impressive, owing to the fact that neither I nor my opponent knows what we are talking about."
"Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing."
"After an author has been dead for some time, it becomes increasingly difficult for his publishers to get a new book out of him each year."
"New York - the city where the people from Oshkosh look at the people from Dubuque in the next theater seats and say, 'These New Yorkers don't dress any better than we do.'"
"A great many people have come up to me and asked how I manage get so much work done and still keep looking so dissipated."
"As for me, except for an occasional heart attack, I feel as young as I ever did."
"Opera is when a guy gets stabbed in the back and instead of bleeding, he sings."
"The freelance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps."