- Love is a publicity stunt, and making love - after the first curious raptures - is only another petulant way to pass the time waiting for the studio to call.
- Most beautiful dumb girls think they are smart and get away with it, because other people, on the whole, aren't much smarter.
- I learned how to act by watching Martha Graham dance and I learned how to dance by watching Charles Chaplin act.
- When I went to Hollywood in 1927, the girls were wearing lumpy sweaters and skirts... I was wearing sleek suits and half naked beaded gowns and piles and piles of furs.
- A well dressed woman, even though her purse is painfully empty, can conquer the world.
- The great art of films does not consist in descriptive movement of face and body, but in the movements of thought and soul transmitted in a kind of intense isolation.
- [on W.C. Fields] He was an isolated person. As a young man, he stretched out his hand to Beauty and Love and they thrust it away. Gradually he reduced reality to exclude all but his work, filling the gaps with alcohol. He was also a solitary person. Years of traveling alone around the world with his juggling act taught him the value of solitude and the release it gave his mind.
- [on Margaret Sullavan] Do you know my favorite actress? She was very special in her appearance, her voice was exquisite and far away, almost like an echo. She was an excellent actress, completely unique. This wonderful voice of hers -- strange, fey, mysterious -- like a voice singing in the snow.
- I have a gift for enraging people, but if I ever bore you, it'll be with a knife.
- [on shooting Pandora's Box (1929)] Kortner [co-star Fritz Kortner] hated me. After each scene with me, he would pound off the set and go to his dressing room. [Director Georg Wilhelm Pabst] himself, wearing his most private smile, would go there to coax him back for the next scene... One sequence gave Kortner an opportunity to shake me with such violence that he left ten black-and-blue fingerprints on my arms.
- [on Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle during the filming of Windy Riley Goes Hollywood (1931)]: He made no attempt to direct this picture at all. He just sat silently all through the three days of filming in his director's chair like a dead man. He had been very nice and sweetly dead ever since the scandal that ruined his career. But it was such an amazing thing for me to come in to make this broken down picture, and to find my director 'William Goodrich' was in fact the great Roscoe Arbuckle. Oh, I thought he was magnificent in films. He was a wonderful dancer... a wonderful ballroom dancer, in his heyday. It was like floating in the arms of a huge donut... really delightful.
- I like Bette Davis. I think she's a real actor, don't you? I never liked Joan Crawford at all. Never. I hate fakes. She was an awful fake. A washerwoman's daughter. I'm a terrible snob, you know.
- [on actress Clara Bow] She wasn't acceptable socially. Eddie Sutherland, my husband, gave absolutely the best parties in Hollywood. So I asked him one day to invite Clara Bow and he said, "Oh, good heavens, no! We can't have her. We don't know what she'd do. She's from Brooklyn.".
- I have been taking stock of my 50 years since I left Wichita. How I have existed fills me with horror for I failed everything. Spelling, arithmetic, writing, swimming, tennis, golf, dancing, singing, acting, wife, mistress, whore, friend, even cooking. And I do not excuse myself with the usual escape of not trying. I tried with all my heart.
- [In a summer 1936 interview] I am delighted with my role in Empty Saddles (1936). It gives me an opportunity to do something, not just stand around and look pretty. I wouldn't trade it for all the other roles I ever had because I am really acting now, not just being an ornament, and I feel that, a last, I am on the road toward getting some place in pictures.
- [on Charles Chaplin]: I never heard him say a snide thing about anyone. He lived totally without fear.
- [on John Wayne] This is no actor but the hero of all mythology miraculously brought to life... John was, in fact, that which Henry James defined as the greatest of all works of art - a purely beautiful being.
- [on trying bisexuality] Out of curiosity, I had two affairs with girls. They did nothing for me.
- [on working with Georg Wilhelm Pabst In Hollywood, I was a pretty flibbertigibbet whose charm for the executive department decreased with every increase in her fan mail. In Berlin, I stepped onto the station platform to meet Pabst and became an actress.
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