Bette Davis

I am doomed to an eternity of compulsive work. No set goal achieved satisfies. Success only breeds a new goal. The golden apple devoured has seeds. It is endless.

I have been uncompromising, peppery, intractable, monomaniacal, tactless, volatile, and oftentimes disagreeable... I suppose I'm larger than life.

Acting should be bigger than life. Scripts should be bigger than life. It should all be bigger than life.

Today everyone is a star - they're all billed as 'starring' or 'also starring'. In my day, we earned that recognition.

Once the love bug wears off, as it inevitably does, you are shocked to discover that you really didn't know the object of your affections at all. We know this to be so, even as we repeat the same mistake over and over and over.

If everybody likes you, you're pretty dull.

You will never be happier than you expect. To change your happiness, change your expectation.

I will not retire while I've still got my legs and my make-up box.

I want to die with my high heels on, still in action.

To fulfill a dream, to be allowed to sweat over lonely labor, to be given a chance to create, is the meat and potatoes of life. The money is the gravy.

If you've never been hated by your child, you've never been a parent.

Fasten your seat belts, it's going to be a bumpy night! - As Margo Channing in All About Eve

Good actors I've worked with all started out making faces in a mirror, and you keep making faces all your life.

You know what I'm going to have on my gravestone? 'She did it the hard way.'

I was the female Marlon Brando of my generation.

Your luck is how you treat people.

There may be a heaven, but if Joan Crawford is there, I'm not going.

I have often seen an actor laugh off the stage, but I don't remember ever having seen one weep.

Oh, don't let's ask for the moon. We've already got the stars.

I would take a bad script and a good director any day against a good script and a bad director.

Psychoanalysis. Almost went three times - almost. Then I decided what was peculiar about me was probably what made me successful. I've seen some very talented actors go into analysis and really lose it.