Quotes by Gloria Swanson

• At 26 I felt myself a victim rather than a victor in the realm of pictures.
• I was married when I was 17. I knew nothing. I was full of romance.
• I became a fanatic about healthy food in 1944.
• After 16 years in pictures I could not be intimidated easily, because I knew where all the skeletons were buried.
• All creative people should be required to leave California for three months every year.
• All they had to do was put my name on a marquee and watch the money roll in.
• As Daddy said, life is 95 percent anticipation.
• Because I take care of my body, it doesn't look like the body of a woman of my years.
• Fame was thrilling only until it became grueling. Money was fun only until you ran out of things to buy.
• From the first moment on the set I was consumed with curiousity about the technical side of shooting a sound picture.
• I always anticipated difficulties in order to avoid scenes.
• I am a very pragmatic person.
• By the time I was 15, my mother had turned me into a real clotheshorse.
• I am big. It's the pictures that got small.
• I was 25 and the most popular celebrity in the world, with the possible exception of my friend Mary Pickford.
• I consider anybody who weighs over 200 pounds fat, and time was when I could not refrain from telling such people so.
• I didn't want to spend the rest of my life playing Norma Desmond over and over again.
• I doubted that there were Communists hiding behind every corporation desk and director's chair.
• I entered the cosmetics industry because I wanted more women to use cosmetics made with safe, healthful ingredients.
• I feel sure that unborn babies pick their parents.
• I had starred in more than 30 successful films, six in a row directed by Cecil B. De Mille.
• There was no place at all for me in my father's military world.
• The English press treated the world premiere of my first talking picture as a major event.
• The first feminine feature that goes, with advancing age, is the neck.
• The fuss that actors began making about the difficulty of shifting to sound struck me as perfectly foolish.
• The major gossip columnists were more concerned with protecting the industry than with gunning down sinners.
• The only time I ever went hunting I remembered it as a grisly experience.
• Your body is the direct result of what you eat as well as what you don't eat.
• Writing the story of your own life is a bit like drilling your own teeth.
• 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.
• We lived on the Key West Army Base. Key West for me was a tropical island paradise.
• The Sennett system of making pictures was actually fun. You never knew what the person next to you was going to do.
• The day I initiated divorce proceedings against Michael Farmer, I was ready to retire to a desert cave and rethink my life.
• When I die, my epitaph should read: She Paid the Bills. That's the story of my private life.
• 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.
• Tennessee Williams was a gifted talker with a beautiful accent and we had lots of things in common.
• 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.
• In two months Joseph Kennedy had taken over my entire life, and I trusted him implicitly to make the most of it.
• If you're 40 years old and you've never had a failure, you've been deprived.
• I was the first celebrity in pictures to be marrying a titled European.
• The Paramount executives were so pleased with Sunset Boulevard that they asked me to do a publicity tour.
• My sculpture is very personal; for years my subjects were family and close, close friends.
• Nobody gets anything for nothing.
• One of the networks sent me a TV set to watch. I didn't care for the medium. It depressed me.
• Sam Wood, the director, made most of his money as a real estate agent; there was nothing of the temperamental artist about him.
• Sunset Boulevard opened in August 1950, and it was pronounced the best movie ever made about Hollywood.
• I've given my memoirs far more thought than any of my marriages. You can't divorce a book.