About my career I was serious and earnest, sometimes impatient.
— Gene Tierney
Chaplin was notoriously strict with his sons and rarely gave them spending money.
Eccentric behavior is not routinely noticed around a movie set.
Hollywood can be hard on women, but it did not cause my problems.
I always tried to play my hunches.
I ask myself: Would I have been any worse off if I had stayed home or lived on a farm instead of shock treatments and medication?
I existed in a world that never is - the prison of the mind.
I had known Cole Porter in Hollywood and New York, spent many a warm hour at his home, and met the talented and original people who were drawn to him.
I hole up now and then and do nothing for days but read.
I loved to eat. For all of Hollywood's rewards, I was hungry for most of those 20 years.
I simply did not want my face to be my talent.
I was fine when it came to cheering up others, not so fine with myself.
I was not cut out to be a rebel.
In later years, I craved foods that were almost always fattening.
It is difficult to write about any form of mental disease, especially your own, without sounding as if you were examining a bug under glass.
Men are wonderful. I adore them. They always give you the benefit of the doubt.
Rehearsals and screening rooms are often unreliable because they can't provide the chemistry between an audience and what appears on the stage or screen.
As an actress, I was trained to show emotion I did not feel, or no emotion at all.
Children don't understand about people loving each other and then suddenly not.
Fonda and Gary Cooper had the best sense of timing of all the actors I knew.
Houses are one of my passions. I probably should have been an interior decorator.
I am not the kind of woman who excuses her mistakes while reminding us of what used to be.
I dated dozens of young men, had fun with all, made commitments to none.
I followed the same diet for 20 years, eliminating starches, living on salads, lean meat, and small portions.
I had no romantic interest in Gable. I considered him an older man.
I knew I could not cope with the future unless I was able to rediscover the past.
I needed to be accepted, not humored. I intended to act.
I used to annoy my father by telling him how much I felt luck was with me.
I was fortunate enough to work under directors who were, most of them, brilliant, emotional men.
I was plunged into what was known as the debutante social whirl. This was one of the ways fathers justified their own hard work and sacrifices.
In my early days in Hollywood I tried to be economical. I designed my own clothes, much to my mother's distress.
It was the fashion of the time, still is, to feel that all actors are neurotic, or they would not be actors.
My departure from Hollywood was described as a walk-out. No one understood that I was cracking up.
Some women feel the best cure for a broken heart is a new beau.
Cars, furs, and gems were not my weaknesses.
Day after day, I spent long afternoons in the talent pool, being told how to walk, how to talk, how to sit.
For years it never occurred to me to question the judgment of those in charge at the studio.
I admire anyone who rids himself of an addiction.
I approached everything, my job, my family, my romances, with intensity.
I do not recall spending long hours in front of a mirror loving my reflection.
I had been offered a Hollywood contract before my 18th birthday. It gave me the spark I needed.
I have a role now that I think becomes me. I am a grandmother.
I learned quickly at Columbia that the only eye that mattered was the one on the camera.
I remember the 1940s as a time when we were united in a way known only to that generation. We belonged to a common cause-the war.
I used up every cent I earned as an actress.
I was going to live on my salary or go down swinging.
I'm not sure I can explain the nature of Jack Kennedy's charm, but he took life just as it came.
In the months leading up to World War II, there was a tendency among many Americans to talk absently about the trouble in Europe. Nothing that happened an ocean away seemed very threatening.
Life is a little like a message in a bottle, to be carried by the winds and the tides.
My mother would not talk to me for weeks, would not stay under my roof for as long as I was married to Oleg.
