After 16 years in pictures I could not be intimidated easily, because I knew where all the skeletons were buried.
After seven years in one place, not to mention two marriages and 32 pictures, I felt I had earned a vacation.
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.
At 26 I felt myself a victim rather than a victor in the realm of pictures.
Because I take care of my body, it doesn't look like the body of a woman of my years.
Billy Wilder provided us all with the time of our lives. He had also brought in a blockbuster.
By the time I was 15, my mother had turned me into a real clotheshorse.
Every victory is also a defeat.
Fame was thrilling only until it became grueling. Money was fun only until you ran out of things to buy.
For weeks I lay between life and death in a Paris hospital, having nightmares about the child I had killed, wishing I were dead myself.
From the first moment on the set I was consumed with curiousity about the technical side of shooting a sound picture.
Hollywood abounded with driven creatures endlessly looking for solace or compensation in alcohol, drugs, and sex.
I always anticipated difficulties in order to avoid scenes.
I am a very pragmatic person.
I am big. It's the pictures that got small.
I became a fanatic about healthy food in 1944.
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 don't like surgeons cutting into me the minute I have a pain somewhere.
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 gave way to feelings of doom before the night was over and dived from the high dive into their swimming pool, fully dressed.
I had always wanted to paint seriously.
I had finally made it to Broadway, in utter triumph, at 51.
I had had to sneak to a French surgeon like a criminal and sacrifice a child I was carrying.
I had learned one thing from my first divorce. Legally, I had left him and had no grounds for a speedy divorce.
I had never liked to lie in bed in the morning.
I had starred in more than 30 successful films, six in a row directed by Cecil B. De Mille.
I loved Paris more than any other place I had ever known.
I pretended to know about everything military. I would quote things I had heard Daddy say.
I was 25 and the most popular celebrity in the world, with the possible exception of my friend Mary Pickford.
I was absolutely mad for dolls. I learned to walk by pushing a toy carriage with a baby doll in it.
I was born under the sign of Aries. I had picked a good time and place to be born. The automobile was not much older than I was.
I was hooked. I was thinking like a producer.
I was married when I was 17. I knew nothing. I was full of romance.
I was not only Cinderella who had married the Prince, but also Lazarus who had risen from the dead.
I was the first celebrity in pictures to be marrying a titled European.
I've given my memoirs far more thought than any of my marriages. You can't divorce a book.
If you're 40 years old and you've never had a failure, you've been deprived.
In two months Joseph Kennedy had taken over my entire life, and I trusted him implicitly to make the most of it.
Intense and exiting as my days at the studio were, my evenings and weekends were becoming more and more of a strain.
Life and death. They are somehow sweetly and beautifully mixed, but I don't know how.
Mr. Kennedy asked about my European grosses. I told him I had my own office in Paris. He had no experience with movie moguls.
Mr. Kennedy installed himself and his organization in a house with a tennis court on Rodeo Drive.
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.
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.
My mother and I could always look out the same window without ever seeing the same thing.
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.
Tampa seemed like another world, with palm trees and the smell of oranges and tangerines in the air.
Tennessee Williams was a gifted talker with a beautiful accent and we had lots of things in common.
The day I initiated divorce proceedings against Michael Farmer, I was ready to retire to a desert cave and rethink my life.
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.
The Paramount executives were so pleased with Sunset Boulevard that they asked me to do a publicity tour.
The people I knew were ill, and growing older, getting gray. I was so insecure I couldn't make firm decisions.
The Sennett system of making pictures was actually fun. You never knew what the person next to you was going to do.
There was no place at all for me in my father's military world.
We lived on the Key West Army Base. Key West for me was a tropical island paradise.
When I die, my epitaph should read: She Paid the Bills. That's the story of my private life.
When I sailed for France in October 1924, I was traveling like a diva.
Writing the story of your own life is a bit like drilling your own teeth.
Your body is the direct result of what you eat as well as what you don't eat.
So convincing was Swanson in her role as Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard that people frequently asked her if she had a body in her swimming pool.
Swanson once appeared on The Tonight Show on the same night as John Lennon and Paul McCartney. FWIW, she was not a fan of the Beatles or their music.
Swanson feuded with fellow silent screen star Pola Negri in the 1920's.
Swanson was cast in the role of Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard after several other actresses, including Pola Negri and Mae West, had rejected the role.
In 1971, Swanson appeared on Broadway in the play Butterflies Are Free.
In her autobiography, Swanson on Swanson, she admitted to having two abortions.
Swanson was nominated three times for an Academy Award for Best Actress: 1951 for Sunset Boulevard, 1930 for The Trespasser, and 1929 for Sadie Thompson.
Swanson had one daughter, Gloria, with second husband Herbert Somborn and a younger daughter, Michelle, with fourth husband Michael Farmer. In 1923, she and Somborn adopted a son named Joseph Patrick.
Swanson appeared as herself in the movie Airport 1975.
Clips from Swanson's unfinished 1929 film Queen Kelly were shown in Sunset Boulevard. Sunset Boulevard co-star Erich Von Stroheim directed the earlier film.
Swanson's film debut was in 1914 as an extra in The Song of Soul.
Swanson played Charlie Chaplin in a skit when she guest-starred on The Carol Burnett Show. She had also done a bit as Chaplin in Sunset Boulevard.
In 1980, Swanson appeared on ABC's 20/20 and talked about her affair with family patriarch Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr. Naturally, the Kennedy family trashed her in a rebuttal with Teddy Kennedy referring to Swanson as an old whore.
Swanson appeared as herself on an episode of The Beverly Hillbillies.
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