Bette Davis Quotes

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

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

I went back to work because someone had to pay for the groceries.

Sex is God’s joke on human beings.

I don’t think of myself as a character actress – that’s become a phrase which means you’ve had it.

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 never did pal around with actresses. Their talk usually bored me to tears.

Basically, I believe the world is a jungle, and if it’s not a bit of a jungle in the home, a child cannot possibly be fit to enter the outside world.

The only reason anyone goes to Broadway is because they can’t get work in the movies.

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

I sent my flowers across the hall to Mrs Nixon but her husband remembered what a Democrat I am and sent them back.

Locations are all tough, all miserable. I never left the sound stage for 18 years at Warners. We never went outside the studio, not even for big scenes.

In this rat-race everybody’s guilty till proved innocent!

I’d like to kiss ya, but I just washed my hair.

I was the Marlon Brando of my generation.

Wave after wave of love flooded the stage and washed over me, the beginning of the one great durable romance of my life.

Old age is no place for sissies.

Without wonder and insight, acting is just a trade. With it, it becomes creation.

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.

I often think that a slightly exposed shoulder emerging from a long satin nightgown packs more sex than two naked bodies in bed.

I work to stay alive.

The key to life is accepting challenges. Once someone stops doing this, he’s dead.

A sure way to lose happiness, I found, is to want it at the expense of everything else.

From the moment I was six I felt sexy. And let me tell you it was hell, sheer hell, waiting to do something about it.

Hollywood always wanted me to be pretty, but I fought for realism.

I’d marry again if I found a man who had fifteen million dollars, would sign over half to me, and guarantee that he’d be dead within a year.

I am just too much.

That’s me: an old kazoo with some sparklers.

People often become actresses because of something they dislike about themselves: They pretend they are someone else.

The best time I ever had with Joan Crawford was when I pushed her down the stairs in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?

Everybody has a heart. Except some people.

Men become much more attractive when they start looking older. But it doesn’t do much for women, though we do have an advantage: make-up.

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