An actress's life is so transitory suddenly you're a building.

When it comes to staying tuned: if you rest, you rust.

The good die young but not always. The wicked prevail but not consistently. I am confused by life, and I feel safe within the confines of the theatre.

Every human being on this earth is born with a tragedy, and it isn't original sin. He's born with the tragedy that he has to grow up... a lot of people don't have the courage to do it.

There is no racial or religious prejudice among people in the theater. The only prejudice is against bad actors, especially successful ones.

Actors cannot choose the manner in which they are born. Consequently, it is the one gesture in their lives completely devoid of self-consciousness.

All my dogs have been scamps and thieves and troublemakers and I've adored them all.

Love is perhaps the only glimpse we are permitted of eternity.

At 50, you need to laugh about your age. If you don't, everybody else will do it for you. Happy birthday, old chum!

We may be living in the twentieth century, in resplendent sophistication. But deep down, most of us find ourselves still in the Stone Age of superstition.

From your parents you learn love and laughter and how to put one foot before the other. But when books are opened you discover that you have wings.

People who refuse to rest honorably on their laurels when they reach retirement age seem very admirable to me.

There is only one terminal dignity -- love.

Only the poet can look beyond the detail and see the whole picture.

We rely upon the poets, the philosophers, and the playwrights to articulate what most of us can only feel, in joy or sorrow. They illuminate the thoughts for which we only grope; they give us the strength and balm we cannot find in ourselves. Whenever I feel my courage wavering, I rush to them. They give me the wisdom of acceptance, the will and resiliance to push on.

The old-fashioned idea that the simple piling up of experiences, one on top of another, can make you an artist, is, of course, so much rubbish. If acting were just a matter of experience, then any busy harlot could make Garbo's Camille pale.

Our house was always filled with dogs... They helped make our house a kennel, it is true, but the constant patter of their filthy paws and the dreadful results of their brainless activities have warmed me throughout the years.

Science has taught us to lengthen life. Now we must learn to make a longer life worth living. Older people deserve choices that let us live out our days as we wish. We've seen people making such choices all over America, and we realize what we might have known from the start: For most of us, there really is no place like home.

The story of a love is not important-what is important is that one is capable of love. It is perhaps the only glimpse we are permitted of eternity.

Stardom can be a gilded slavery.