Quotes by Gene Tierney

• When you have spent an important part of your life playing Let's Pretend, it's often easy to see symbolism where none exists.
• What a different world it was when I first sailed for Europe in 1930, with my mother, sister, and brother to spend six months abroad.
• When I met Jack Kennedy, he was a serious young man with a dream. He was not a womanizer, not as I understood the term.
• We cannot calculate the numbers of people who left, fled or were fished out of Europe just ahead of the Holocaust.
• Unlike the stage, I never found it helpful to be good in a bad movie.
• Trying to make order out of my life was like trying to pick up a jellyfish.
• Throughout my career, I was to be cast as a frontier girl, an aristocrat, an Arabian, a Eurasian, a Polynesian, and a Chinese.
• When my mood was high, I seemed normal, even buoyant. I felt smarter. I had secrets. I could see God in a light bulb.
• Wealth, beauty, and fame are transient. When those are gone, little is left except the need to be useful.
• Cars, furs, and gems were not my weaknesses.
• I admire anyone who rids himself of an addiction.
• Hollywood can be hard on women, but it did not cause my problems.
• For years it never occurred to me to question the judgment of those in charge at the studio.
• Fonda and Gary Cooper had the best sense of timing of all the actors I knew.
• Everyone should see Hollywood once, I think, through the eyes of a teenage girl who has just passed a screen test.
• Eccentric behavior is not routinely noticed around a movie set.
• Day after day, I spent long afternoons in the talent pool, being told how to walk, how to talk, how to sit.
• Chaplin was notoriously strict with his sons and rarely gave them spending money.
• As an actress, I was trained to show emotion I did not feel, or no emotion at all.
• About my career I was serious and earnest, sometimes impatient.
• I always tried to play my hunches.
• Children don't understand about people loving each other and then suddenly not.
• My mother would not talk to me for weeks, would not stay under my roof for as long as I was married to Oleg.
• I was not cut out to be a rebel.
• 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.
• I'm not sure I can explain the nature of Jack Kennedy's charm, but he took life just as it came.
• In later years, I craved foods that were almost always fattening.
• In my early days in Hollywood I tried to be economical. I designed my own clothes, much to my mother's distress.
• 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.
• 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.
• It was the fashion of the time, still is, to feel that all actors are neurotic, or they would not be actors.
• I was going to live on my salary or go down swinging.
• Men are wonderful. I adore them. They always give you the benefit of the doubt.
• Life is a little like a message in a bottle, to be carried by the winds and the tides.
• 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.
• Some women feel the best cure for a broken heart is a new beau.
• The Hollywood structure was monopolistic, run by four or five big studios.
• The Howard Hughes I knew began to change after his plane crash in 1941.
• The main cause of my difficulties stemmed from the tragedy of my daughter's unsound birth and my inability to face my feelings.
• The word actress has always seemed less a job description to me than a title.
• There were days that I worked all the time, without a layoff, or a rest, finishing one picture and reporting for another sometimes on the same day.
• Those who become mentally ill often have a history of chronic pain.
• Houses are one of my passions. I probably should have been an interior decorator.
• Jealousy is, I think, the worst of all faults because it makes a victim of both parties.
• I had no romantic interest in Gable. I considered him an older man.
• My departure from Hollywood was described as a walk-out. No one understood that I was cracking up.
• I was fortunate enough to work under directors who were, most of them, brilliant, emotional men.
• 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 dated dozens of young men, had fun with all, made commitments to none.
• I do not recall spending long hours in front of a mirror loving my reflection.
• I existed in a world that never is - the prison of the mind.
• I followed the same diet for 20 years, eliminating starches, living on salads, lean meat, and small portions.
• I had been offered a Hollywood contract before my 18th birthday. It gave me the spark I needed.
• 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 approached everything, my job, my family, my romances, with intensity.
• I have a role now that I think becomes me. I am a grandmother.
• 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 was fine when it came to cheering up others, not so fine with myself.
• I used up every cent I earned as an actress.
• I simply did not want my face to be my talent.
• I am not the kind of woman who excuses her mistakes while reminding us of what used to be.
• I needed to be accepted, not humored. I intended to act.
• I loved to eat. For all of Hollywood's rewards, I was hungry for most of those 20 years.
• I learned quickly at Columbia that the only eye that mattered was the one on the camera.
• I knew I could not cope with the future unless I was able to rediscover the past.
• I hole up now and then and do nothing for days but read.
• I used to annoy my father by telling him how much I felt luck was with me.