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Marilyn Monroe
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“I had the radio on.”
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“Chanel No. 5.”
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“Sometimes it makes you a little sad because you'd like to meet somebody kind of on face value. It's nice to be included in people's fantasies but you also like to be accepted for your own sake.”
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“... a struggle with shyness is in every actor more than anyone can imagine.”
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“An actor is not a machine ... Like any creative human being, I would like a bit more control so that it would be a little easier for me when the director says, 'One tear, right now,' that one tear would pop out. But once there came two tears because I thought, 'How dare he?'”
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“An actor is supposed to be a sensitive instrument. Isaac Stern takes good care of his violin. What if everybody jumped on his violin?”
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“You're always running into people's unconscious.”
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“I never quite understood it — this sex symbol. ... That's the trouble, a sex symbol becomes a thing. I just hate to be a thing.”
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“We are all born sexual creatures, thank God, but it's a pity so many people despise and crush this natural gift. Art, real art, comes from it ... ”
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“Fame to me certainly is only a temporary and a partial happiness ... fame is not really for a daily diet, that's not what fulfills you. It warms you a bit but the warming is temporary. It's like caviar, you know — it's good to have caviar but not when you have to have it every meal and every day.”
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“I used to get the feeling, and sometimes I still get it, that sometimes I was fooling somebody. I don't know who or what — maybe myself.”
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“Fame will go by and, so long, I've had you, fame. If it goes by, I've always known it was fickle. So at least it's something I experienced, but that's not where I live.”
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“We human beings are strange creatures and still reserve the right to think for ourselves.”
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“...when you're famous you kind of run into human nature in a raw kind of way. It stirs up envy, fame does. People ... feel fame gives them some kind of privilege to walk up to you and say anything to you, you know, of any kind of nature — and it won't hurt your feelings — like it's happening to your clothing.”
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“Couldn't we end this interview with what I really want to say? That what the world really needs is a real feeling of kinship — everybody: stars, laborers, Negroes, Jews, Arabs. We are all brothers. If we could end this article saying just that, we'd get down to what we should all be talking about. Please don't make me a joke. End the interview with what I believe.”
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“I've been on a calendar, but never on time.”
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“Goethe said, 'Talent is developed in privacy,' you know? ... There is a need for aloneness which I don't think most people realize for an actor. It's almost having certain kinds of secrets for yourself that you'll let the whole world in on only for a moment, when you're acting.”
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“An actress is not a machine, but they treat you like one. A money machine.”
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“Hollywood's a place where they'll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss, and fifty cents for your soul.”
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“If I am a star, it was the people who made me one — not the studio, but the people.”
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“Being a movie star was never as much fun as dreaming of being one.”
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“I'm selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best.”
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“... I don't care about the money. I just want to be wonderful.”
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“In Hollywood, a girl's virtue is much less important than her hair-do. ”
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“A smart girl is one who knows how to play tennis, golf, piano — and dumb. ”
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“I don't mind this being a man's world — as long as I can be a woman in it.”
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“Husbands are chiefly good as lovers when they are betraying their wives.”
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“I want to grow old without face lifts. They take the life out of a face, the character. I want to have the courage to be loyal to the face I've made.”
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“Ever notice that what the hell is always the right decision?”
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“My work is the only ground I've ever had to stand on.”
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“A sweater is like life, you get nothing out of it that you don't put into it!”
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“I use walking just to get me around.”
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“I sit down the way I feel.”
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“... if I'm going to be a symbol of something, I'd rather have it sex than some of the other things they've got symbols for today. ”
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“I'm trying to find myself as a person. Sometime that's not easy to do. Millions of people live their entire lives without finding themselves. But it is something I must do.”
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“Doing a scene is like opening a bottle. If it doesn't open one way, try another — perhaps even give it up for another bottle?”
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“... our marriage was a sort of crazy, difficult friendship with sexual privileges. Later I learned that's what marriages often are.”
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“I always felt I was a nobody, and the only way for me to be somebody was to be — well, somebody else. Which is probably why I wanted to act.”
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“Those who know me better, know better.”
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“In leaving Hollywood and coming to New York, I feel I can be more myself. After all, if I can't be myself, what's the good of being anything at all?”
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“Squeezing yourself to ooze out the last ounce of sex allure is terribly hard. I'd like to do roles like Julie in Bury the Dead, Gretchen in Faust and Teresa in Cradle Song.”
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“When you're a failure in Hollywood — that's like starving to death outside a banquet hall with the smells of filet mignon driving you crazy.”
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“The worst thing that happens to people when they dress up and go to a party is that they leave their real selves at home.”
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“I read poetry to save time.”
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“I knew how third-rate I was. I could actually feel my lack of talent, as if it were cheap clothes I was wearing inside, But, my God, how I wanted to learn, to change, to improve! I didn't want anything else. Not men, not money, not love, but the ability to act.”
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“... if a star or studio chief or any other great movie personages find themselves sitting among a lot of nobodies, they get frightened — as if somebody was trying to demote them.”
Marilyn Monroe, U.S. actor
(1936 - 1962)
Name: Norma Jeane Mortenson Baker Dougherty DiMaggio Miller. Her birth certificate reads Norma Jeane Mortenson. Caveat: Marilyn Monroe apparently read widely, and she kept notebooks of her own thoughts and ideas, but quoting her often depends on interviews, second-hand quotations, and possibly unreliable attributions. The unsourced quotes above seem dubious, although they have appeared in print somewhere, sometime.