Quote collection
88 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I watched a snail crawl along the edge of a straight razor. That's my dream. That's my nightmare. Crawling, slithering, along the edge of a straight razor and surviving."
"With women, I've got a long bamboo pole with a leather loop on the end. I slip the loop around their necks so they can't get away or come too close. Like catching snakes."
"In a close-up, the audience is only inches away, and your face becomes the stage."
"We only have so many faces in our pockets"
"Nobody "becomes" a character. You can't act unless you are who you are."
"Do you remember when Marilyn Monroe died? Everybody stopped work, and you could see all that day the same expressions on their faces, the same thought: ‘How can a girl with success, fame, youth, money, beauty . . . how could she kill herself?’ Nobody could understand it because those are the things that everybody wants, and they can’t believe that life wasn’t important to Marilyn Monroe, or that her life was elsewhere"
"A sensitive person receives fifty impressions where somebody else may only get seven. Sensitive people are so vulnerable; they're so easily brutalized and hurt just because they are sensitive. The more sensitive you are, the more certain you are to be brutalized, develop scabs.Analysis helps. It helped me. But still, the last eight, nine years I've been pretty messed up, a mess pretty much."
"Like a large number of men, I, too, have had homosexual experiences and I am not ashamed. But if there is someone who is convinced that Jack Nicholson and I are lovers, may they continue to do so. I find it amusing."
"The principal benefit acting has afforded me is the money to pay for my psychoanalysis."
"If you want something from an audience, you give blood to their fantasies. It's the ultimate hustle."
"The four pillars of wisdom that support journalistic endeavors are: lies, stupidity, money-grubbing, and ethical irresponsibility."
"I have decided to tell the story of my life as best I can, so that my children can separate the truth from the myths that others have created about me, as myths are created about everyone swept up in the turbulent and distorting maelstrom of celebrity in our culture."
"The Jews control Hollywood and use it to promote their own agenda."
"We don't go anywhere. Going somewhere is for squares. We just go!"
"We make up any excuse to preserve myths about people we love, but the reverse is also true; if we dislike an individual we adamantly resist changing our opinion, even when somebody offers proof of his decency, because it's vital to have myths about both the gods and devils in our lives."
"Most of the successful people in Hollywood are failures as human beings."
"I refused to be a fool dancing on a string held by all of those big shots. I don't apologise, that's my life"
"I had to read Wuthering Heights for English and I never enjoyed a book in all my life as much as that one."
"It's the hardest thing in the world to accept a 'little' success and leave it that way."
"Acting is the expression of a neurotic impulse. It's a bum's life. Quitting acting, that's the sign of maturity."