Writing the story of your own life is a bit like drilling your own teeth.
I was the first celebrity in pictures to be marrying a titled European.
I doubted that there were Communists hiding behind every corporation desk and director’s chair.
The Paramount executives were so pleased with Sunset Boulevard that they asked me to do a publicity tour.
The first feminine feature that goes, with advancing age, is the neck.
The English press treated the world premiere of my first talking picture as a major event.
Tennessee Williams was a gifted talker with a beautiful accent and we had lots of things in common.
One of the networks sent me a TV set to watch. I didn’t care for the medium. It depressed me.
In two months Joseph Kennedy had taken over my entire life, and I trusted him implicitly to make the most of it.
Sam Wood, the director, made most of his money as a real estate agent; there was nothing of the temperamental artist about him.
Never say never, for if you live long enough, chances are you will not be able to abide by the simplest of such injunctions.
I have gone through a long apprenticeship. I have gone through enough of being a nobody. I have decided that when I am a star, I will be every inch and every moment the star! Everybody from the studio gateman to the highest executive will know it.
After 16 years in pictures I could not be intimidated easily, because I knew where all the skeletons were buried.
I was 25 and the most popular celebrity in the world, with the possible exception of my friend Mary Pickford.
The only time I ever went hunting I remembered it as a grisly experience.
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.
I was married when I was 17. I knew nothing. I was full of romance.
I’ve given my memoirs far more thought than any of my marriages. You can’t divorce a book.
By the time I was 15, my mother had turned me into a real clotheshorse.
It’s amazing to find that so many people, who I thought really knew me, could have thought that ‘Sunset Boulevard’ was autobiographical. I’ve got nobody floating in my swimming pool.
Sunset Boulevard opened in August 1950, and it was pronounced the best movie ever made about Hollywood.