- You once liked the blissful mobility, but then you wonder, who's the real you? And who's the chap on the screen? You know, I catch myself acting out my life like a goddamn script.
- They've great respect for the dead in Hollywood, but none for the living.
- I do what I like.
- I like my whiskey old and my women young.
- I've had a hell of a lot of fun and I've enjoyed every minute of it.
- I can't reconcile my gross habits with my net income.
- I intend to live the first half of my life. I don't care about the rest.
- The public has always expected me to be a playboy, and a decent chap never lets his public down.
- It isn't what they say about you, it's what they whisper.
- If I have any genius it is a genius for living.
- I felt like an impostor, taking all that money for reciting ten or twelve lines of nonsense a day.
- Women won't let me stay single, and I won't let myself stay married.
- I allow myself to be understood as a colorful fragment in a drab world.
- I've made six or seven good films - the others, not so good.
- My job is to defy the normal.
- By instinct I'm an adventurer; by choice I'd like to be a writer; by pure, unadulterated luck, I'm an actor.
- I had now made about forty-five pictures, but what had I become? I knew all too well: a phallic symbol. All over the world I was, as a name and personality, equated with sex.
- I had no greatness, only a deadly fear of mediocrity.
- I still had some will left. Some of that I directed to a very lovely-looking redhead who occupied a cubicle in the lobby entrance of the City Hall. Day by day I passed by her and watched how she sold chewing gum.
- Bette was a dynamic creature, the great big star of the lot, but not physically my type; dominating everybody around, and especially me.
- [on New Guinea] I took a look at where I was, roaming from spot to spot ... looking for gold, bumping and bumbling about like a blind bumblebee, hoping for a chance, plunging at a jungle with bare hands.
- I laughed. My friends laughed. I had pals. They had yachts. We dined on their yachts or they dined on ours.
- I am dangerous to be with because, since I live dangerously, others are subject to the danger that I expose myself to. They, more likely than I, will get hurt.
- [on his first rape trial] Who approaches a prospective sweetheart asking her to whip out her birth certificate, or driver's license, or show a letter from her mother?
- I might have been guilty as hell - under the law, that is. But in the world of day-to-day common sense ... everybody knew that the girls had asked for it, whether or not I had my wicked ways with them.
- I have been in rebellion against God and government ever since I can remember.
- I make more today being a shadow of my former self than I did when I was my former self.
- I felt used. Used by the studio. Used to make money. Used by the press for fun. Used by society as a piece of chalk to provide the world with a dab of color.
- Maybe I haven't been such a loss after all. Anybody who can bring a few moments of happiness to another human life certainly can't be wasting his time in an otherwise fear-ridden and often very drab world. Maybe it hasn't all been so futile. Maybe it wasn't all a waste.
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