A fan site dedicated to Bette Davis.
[on longtime rival Joan Crawford] "I wouldn't piss on her if she was on fire."
[in 1982] "Acting should be bigger than life. Scripts should be bigger than life. It should ALL be bigger than life."
"Getting old is not for sissies."
"I see - she's the original good time that was had by all."
"Until you're known in my profession as a monster, you're not a star."
"At 50, I thought proudly, 'Here we are, half century!' Being 60 was fairly frightening. You want to know how I spent my 70th birthday? I put on a completely black face, a fuzzy black afro wig, wore black clothes, and hung a black wreath on my door."
"I went back to work because someone had to pay for the groceries."
"I'm the nicest goddamn dame that ever lived."
[on rival Joan Crawford] "She has slept with every male star at MGM except Lassie."
[on her character in All About Eve (1950)] "Margo Channing was not a bitch. She was an actress who was getting older and was not too happy about it. And why should she be? Anyone who says that life begins at 40 is full of it. As people get older their bodies begin to decay. They get sick. They forget things. What's good about that?"
"Gay Liberation? I ain't against it, it's just that there's nothing in it for me."
"Success only breeds a new goal."
"What a fool I was to come to Hollywood where they only understand platinum blondes and where legs are more important than talent."
"I have never known the great actor who... didn't plan eventually to direct or produce. If he has no such dream, he is usually bitter, ungratified and eventually alcoholic."
"There was more good acting at Hollywood parties than ever appeared on the screen."
"I would advise any woman against having an affair with a married man believing he will ever leave his wife, no matter how often he says his wife does not understand him. Love is not as necessary to a man's happiness as it is to a woman's. If her marriage is satisfactory, a woman will seldom stray. A man can be totally contented and still be out howling at the moon."
"The male ego, with few exceptions, is elephantine to start with."
"To fulfill a dream, to be allowed to sweat over lonely labor, to be given a chance to create, is the meat and potatoes of life. The money is the gravy."
"I'd marry again if I found a man who had fifteen million dollars, would sign over half to me, and guarantee that he'd be dead within a year."
"An affair now and then is good for a marriage. It adds spice, stops it from getting boring. I ought to know."
[referring to her parents' divorce when she was 7] "Of course I replaced my father. I became my own father and everyone else's."
"I will never be below the title."
"If you want a thing well done, get a couple of old broads to do it."
"Today everyone is a star - they're all billed as 'starring' or 'also starring'. In my day, we earned that recognition."
[about Katharine Hepburn's tie for the 1968 Oscar with Barbra Streisand] "I wanted to be the first to win three Oscars, but Miss Hepburn has done it. Actually it hasn't been done. Miss Hepburn only won half an Oscar. If they'd given me half an Oscar I would have thrown it back in their faces. You see, I'm an Aries. I never lose."
[referring to her fourth husband, Gary Merrill] "Gary was a macho man, but none of my husbands was ever man enough to become Mr. Bette Davis."
[when told that "at one time" she had a reputation for being difficult] "At one time?! I've been known as difficult for 50 years, practically! What do you mean "at one time"? Nooo, I've been like this for 50 years. And it's always always to make it the best film I can make it!"
"Why am I so good at playing bitches? I think it's because I'm not a bitch. Maybe that's why [Joan Crawford] always plays ladies."
[when told not to speak ill of the dead] "Just because someone is dead does not mean they have changed!"
[on sex] "God's biggest joke on human beings."
[commenting on the death of long-time nemesis Joan Crawford] "You should never say bad things about the dead, you should only say good . . . Joan Crawford is dead. Good."
[commenting about her mother, an aspiring actress]" I had to be the monster for both of us."
"If Hollywood didn't work out, I was prepared to be the best secretary in the world."
"I have been uncompromising, peppery, infractable, monomaniacal, tactless, volatile and offtimes disagreeable. I suppose I'm larger than life."
"[Joan Crawford] and I have never been warm friends. We are not simpatico. I admire her, and yet I feel uncomfortable with her. To me, she is the personification of the Movie Star. I have always felt her greatest performance is Crawford being Crawford."
[after having blown the same line several times in Hollywood Canteen (1944), in which she plays herself] "I don't know what's wrong with me, but I think I just can't play myself. I don't know how! But, if you give me a drink - give me a cigarette - give me a gun - I'll play any old bag you want me to. I just can't play myself!"
"Beyond the Forest (1949) was a terrible movie! It had the longest death scene ever seen on the screen."
"I was a person who couldn't make divorce work. For me, there's nothing lonelier than a turned-down toilet seat."
[before taking her final flight in 1989] "I want to die with my high heels on, still in action."
"I always had the will to win. I felt it baking cookies. They had to be the best cookies anyone baked."
"When I die, they'll probably auction off my false eyelashes."
"My favorite person to work with was Claude Rains."
[on John Wayne] "I certainly would have given anything to have worked with John Wayne. He's the most attractive man who ever walked the earth, I think."
[on Errol Flynn] "He was just beautiful . . . Errol. He himself openly said I don't know really anything about acting, and I admire his honesty because he's absolutely right."
[on director Lindsay Anderson] "I think he's a very talented man, but I think he's a difficult man to work with. He really prefers theatre and not film, and that's a little depressing, I must say."
[on Errol Flynn] "He was not an actor of enormous talent -- he would have admitted that himself -- but in all those swashbuckling things he was beautiful."
[in 1977, on why she was still working] "So I am up to my ears in taxes and debts, and that's why I come out of my house in Connecticut every few years and work. I can hole up for just so long, then I gotta get out and stir things up again. It's half for income and half for me."
[during tension on the set of The Whales of August (1987) about her esteemed costar Lillian Gish] "She ought to know about close-ups! Jesus, she was around when they invented them!"
"Love is not enough. It must be the foundation, the cornerstone - but not the complete structure. It is much too pliable, too yielding."
"We movie stars all end up by ourselves. Who knows? Maybe we want to."
"Without wonder and insight, acting is just a trade. With it, it becomes creation."
"You know what I'm going to have on my gravestone? 'She did it the hard way.'"
"You should know me well enough by now to know I don't ask for things I don't think I can get."
"Men become much more attractive when they start looking older. But it doesn't do much for women, though we do have an advantage: make-up."
"My passions were all gathered together like fingers that made a fist. Drive is considered aggression today; I knew it then as purpose."
"People often become actresses because of something they dislike about themselves: They pretend they are someone else."
"Psychoanalysis. Almost went three times - almost. Then I decided what was peculiar about me was probably what made me successful. I've seen some very talented actors go into analysis and really lose it."
"I was the Marlon Brando of my generation."
"I will not retire while I've still got my legs and my make-up box."
"Discipline is a symbol of caring to a child. He needs guidance. If there is love, there is no such thing as being too tough with a child. A parent must also not be afraid to hang himself. If you have never been hated by your child, you have never been a parent."
"Hollywood always wanted me to be pretty, but I fought for realism."
"I am doomed to an eternity of compulsive work. No set goal achieved satisfies. Success only breeds a new goal. The golden apple devoured has seeds. It is endless."
"I am just too much."
"I don't take the movies seriously, and anyone who does is in for a headache."
"I never did pal around with actresses. Their talk usually bored me to tears."