Top 19 Judy Holliday Quotes

People have a hard time making me dress up to look like a classy gal.

We gained a great deal of prestige, but not much money. We liked to work so much we couldn’t hide it and the club owners paid us accordingly.

It’s tough when take 1 is technically okay and take 2 has better acting. Out here (Hollywood) they print the first one. That’s the one where we all hit the mark on the floor and who cares about the acting.

I am not a member of any organization listed by the Attorney General as subversive. In any instance where I lent my name in the past, it was certainly without knowledge that such an organization was subversive. I have always been essentially and foremost an American.

I hated the whole idea of being an actress. I used to throw up before every performance and cry afterward.

If you can handle a nightclub audience successfully, you can handle anything.

You have to be smart to play a dumb blonde over and over again and keep the audience’s attention without extraordinary physical equipment.

Acting is a very limited form of expression and those who take it seriously are very limited people. I take it seriously.

Now with all this movie business, everybody’s coming around wanting to know everything that’s happened since I was four. It’s like going to an analyst.

I suppose that if I could have quit, I would have, because in those days I never wanted to be an actress, the acting was something to do while I waited for a chance to study writing and directing. But I guess I was just meant to be an actress. Because, here I am.

When they thought of me, they always remembered the vacuous Billie Dawn. It was as simple as that.

Of course I work hard. Why shouldn’t I? Who am I to think I should get things the easy way?

I’m trying to eliminate every vestige of my own personality, style, approach and get into somebody else’s skin. Sometimes I feel I’ve accomplished it. But when I don’t, I’m nobody at all, having left myself at home.

It meant as much to me as winning the Oscar.

I am not an ‘instant’ actor… to really do anything, I’ve got to try it five or six or a dozen times.

I’m a born and bred New Yorker. I belong here. Everytime I leave it’s like losing a leg.

They weren’t interested in entertainment. They were tough. I learned one trick, which was to be quieter than they were until they had to look at you. It took a lot of agressiveness.

I think Billie is the kind of girl who would let her hips swing loose.

I could talk about him all day. He’s one of the most wonderful things that ever happened to me.