Top 40 Gloria Swanson Quotes

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.

Life and death. They are somehow sweetly and beautifully mixed, but I don’t know how.

I was 25 and the most popular celebrity in the world, with the possible exception of my friend Mary Pickford.

My sculpture is very personal; for years my subjects were family and close, close friends.

The fuss that actors began making about the difficulty of shifting to sound struck me as perfectly foolish.

After 16 years in pictures I could not be intimidated easily, because I knew where all the skeletons were buried.

Fame was thrilling only until it became grueling. Money was fun only until you ran out of things to buy.

Much as I cared for Joseph Kennedy, he was a classic example of that person in the arts with lots of brains and drive but little taste or talent.

The only time I ever went hunting I remembered it as a grisly experience.

If you’re 40 years old and you’ve never had a failure, you’ve been deprived.

I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.

When I die, my epitaph should read: She Paid the Bills. That’s the story of my private life.

I always anticipated difficulties in order to avoid scenes.

One of the networks sent me a TV set to watch. I didn’t care for the medium. It depressed me.

The English press treated the world premiere of my first talking picture as a major event.

I am a very pragmatic person.

Because I take care of my body, it doesn’t look like the body of a woman of my years.

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.

I doubted that there were Communists hiding behind every corporation desk and director’s chair.

In two months Joseph Kennedy had taken over my entire life, and I trusted him implicitly to make the most of it.

I became a fanatic about healthy food in 1944.

At 26 I felt myself a victim rather than a victor in the realm of pictures.

The day I initiated divorce proceedings against Michael Farmer, I was ready to retire to a desert cave and rethink my life.

I feel sure that unborn babies pick their parents.

All creative people should be required to leave California for three months every year.

The major gossip columnists were more concerned with protecting the industry than with gunning down sinners.

Nobody gets anything for nothing.

I had starred in more than 30 successful films, six in a row directed by Cecil B. De Mille.

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 consider anybody who weighs over 200 pounds fat, and time was when I could not refrain from telling such people so.

Your body is the direct result of what you eat as well as what you don’t eat.

I entered the cosmetics industry because I wanted more women to use cosmetics made with safe, healthful ingredients.

There was no place at all for me in my father’s military world.

Tennessee Williams was a gifted talker with a beautiful accent and we had lots of things in common.

As Daddy said, life is 95 percent anticipation.

We lived on the Key West Army Base. Key West for me was a tropical island paradise.

I’ve given my memoirs far more thought than any of my marriages. You can’t divorce a book.

I was married when I was 17. I knew nothing. I was full of romance.