- I learned at a very early age that life is a battle. My family was poor, my neighborhood was poor. The only way that I could get away from the awfulness of life, at that time, was at the movies. There I decided that my big aim was to make money. And it was there that I became a very determined woman.
- I never thought of myself as a movie star. I'm just a working girl. A working girl who worked her way to the top--and never fell off.
- My life is fair game for anybody. I spent an unhappy, penniless childhood in Brooklyn. I had to slug my way up in a town called Hollywood where people love to trample you to death. I don't relax because I don't know how. I don't want to know how. Life is too short to relax.
- When you're dead, you're dead. No one is going to remember me when I'm dead. Oh, maybe a few friends will remember me affectionately. Being remembered isn't the most important thing, anyhow. It's what you do when you are here that's important.
- You aim at all the things you have been told that stardom means--the rich life, the applause, the parties cluttered with celebrities. Then you find that you have it all. And it is nothing, really nothing. It is like a drug that lasts just a few hours, a sleeping pill. When it wears off, you have to live without its help.
- [to Darryl F. Zanuck's request that she attend the Academy Awards ceremony, 1952] I attended twice and I lost twice and I had to explain to some of those vultures who had been dying for me to lose how "there'll always be a next day". Well, I'm not going to make a TV spectacle of myself in front of a few million viewers and that's that!
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