When I die, my epitaph should read: She Paid the Bills. That's the story of my private life.
— Gloria Swanson
Writing the story of your own life is a bit like drilling your own teeth.
The Sennett system of making pictures was actually fun. You never knew what the person next to you was going to do.
The major gossip columnists were more concerned with protecting the industry than with gunning down sinners.
The English press treated the world premiere of my first talking picture as a major event.
Sunset Boulevard opened in August 1950, and it was pronounced the best movie ever made about Hollywood.
Nobody gets anything for nothing.
My greatest debt will always be to the movie-going public of yesterday and today, without whose love and devotion I would have had no story to tell.
In two months Joseph Kennedy had taken over my entire life, and I trusted him implicitly to make the most of it.
I was married when I was 17. I knew nothing. I was full of romance.
I feel sure that unborn babies pick their parents.
I didn't want to spend the rest of my life playing Norma Desmond over and over again.
I am a very pragmatic person.
Fame was thrilling only until it became grueling. Money was fun only until you ran out of things to buy.
At 26 I felt myself a victim rather than a victor in the realm of pictures.
After 16 years in pictures I could not be intimidated easily, because I knew where all the skeletons were buried.
I am big. It's the pictures that got small.
We lived on the Key West Army Base. Key West for me was a tropical island paradise.
The Paramount executives were so pleased with Sunset Boulevard that they asked me to do a publicity tour.
The fuss that actors began making about the difficulty of shifting to sound struck me as perfectly foolish.
The day I initiated divorce proceedings against Michael Farmer, I was ready to retire to a desert cave and rethink my life.
Sam Wood, the director, made most of his money as a real estate agent; there was nothing of the temperamental artist about him.
My sculpture is very personal; for years my subjects were family and close, close friends.
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.
If you're 40 years old and you've never had a failure, you've been deprived.
I was 25 and the most popular celebrity in the world, with the possible exception of my friend Mary Pickford.
I entered the cosmetics industry because I wanted more women to use cosmetics made with safe, healthful ingredients.
I consider anybody who weighs over 200 pounds fat, and time was when I could not refrain from telling such people so.
I always anticipated difficulties in order to avoid scenes.
By the time I was 15, my mother had turned me into a real clotheshorse.
As Daddy said, life is 95 percent anticipation.
All creative people should be required to leave California for three months every year.
Your body is the direct result of what you eat as well as what you don't eat.
There was no place at all for me in my father's military world.
The only time I ever went hunting I remembered it as a grisly experience.
The first feminine feature that goes, with advancing age, is the neck.
Tennessee Williams was a gifted talker with a beautiful accent and we had lots of things in common.
One of the networks sent me a TV set to watch. I didn't care for the medium. It depressed me.
My mother and I could always look out the same window without ever seeing the same thing.
Life and death. They are somehow sweetly and beautifully mixed, but I don't know how.
I was the first celebrity in pictures to be marrying a titled European.
I had starred in more than 30 successful films, six in a row directed by Cecil B. De Mille.
I doubted that there were Communists hiding behind every corporation desk and director's chair.
I became a fanatic about healthy food in 1944.
From the first moment on the set I was consumed with curiousity about the technical side of shooting a sound picture.
Because I take care of my body, it doesn't look like the body of a woman of my years.
All they had to do was put my name on a marquee and watch the money roll in.
I've given my memoirs far more thought than any of my marriages. You can't divorce a book.
