Ava Gardner Quotes

The truth is, honey, I've enjoyed my life. I've had a hell of a good time.

When I’m old and gray, I want to have a house by the sea. And paint. With a lot of wonderful chums, good music, and booze around. And a damn good kitchen to cook in.

Sex isn't all that important, but it is when you love someone very much.

I've been thinking lately about immortality. What it means to be remembered, what I want to be remembered for, certain questions concerning memory and fame. I love watching old movies. I watch the faces of long-dead actors on the screen, and I think about how they'll never truly die. I know that's a cliché but it happens to be true. Not just the famous ones who everyone knows, the Clark Gables, the Ava Gardners, but the bit players, the maid carrying the tray, the butler, the cowboys in the bar, the third girl from the left in the nightclub. They're all immortal to me. First we only want to be seen, but once we're seen, that's not enough anymore. After that, we want to be remembered.

I wish to live to 150 years old, but the day I die, I wish it to be with a cigarette in one hand and a glass of whiskey in the other.

When I lose my temper, honey, you can't find it any place.

Go fuck yourself," I replied, always the lady. "I'm staying here.

God knows I've got so many frailties myself, I ought to be able to understand and forgive them in others. But I don't.

Maybe, in the final analysis, they saw me as something I wasn't and I tried to turn them into something they could never be. I loved them all but maybe I never understood any of them. I don't think they understood me.

I have only one rule in acting--trust the director, and give him heart and soul.

Hell, I suppose if you stick around long enough they have to say something nice about you.

Deep down, I'm pretty superficial.

I think the main reason my marriages failed is that I always loved too well but never wisely.

When you have to face up to the fact that marriage to the man you love is really over, that's very tough, sheer agony. In that kind of harrowing situation, I always go away and cut myself off from the world. Also, I sober up immediately when there is genuine bad news in my life; I never face it with alcohol in my brain. I just rented a house in Palm Springs and sat there and just suffered for a couple of weeks. I suffered there until I was strong enough to face it.

I want to remember it all, the good times and the bad times, the late nights, the boozing, the dancing into dawns, and all the great and not-so-great people I met and loved in those years…

I hate cheating. I won’t put up with it. I don’t do it myself.

If I had my life to live over again, I'd live it the same way. Maybe a few changes here or there, but nothing special. The truth is, honey, I've enjoyed my life. I've had a hell of a good time.

Great idea," I said. "Call the police. Call the fucking police.

The truth is that the only time I'm happy is when I'm doing absolutely nothing. I don't understand people who like to work and talk about it like it was some sort of goddamn duty. Doing nothing feel like floating on warm water to me. Delightful, perfect.

So this was where lust was satisfied. If I'd been an old-time miner I'd have asked for my gold nugget back.

He will always be my Sir Galahad.

And I won 'em back fair and square. So what are you going to do about it? Want to fight? Who wants the first bloody nose?

I'm here to tell you, there ain't much forgiveness in that old-time religion. That particular savior was a mean son of a bitch. If you sinned, honey, he was going to get you, no doubt about it.

I either write the books or sell the jewels , and I'm kinda sentimental about the jewels.

In one scene, when I was supposed to say, "In a pig's eye you are," what came out was, "In a pig's ass you are." Old habits die awfully hard.

Our phone bills were astronomical, and when I found the letters Frank wrote me the other day, the total could fill a suitcase. Every single day during our relationship, no matter where in the world I was, I'd get a telegram from Frank saying he loved me and missed me. He was a man who was deseperate for companionship and love. Can you wonder that he always had mine!

Don't think for a minute that bad publicity and endless criticism don't leave their claw marks on everyone concerned. Your friends try to cheer you up by saying lightly, "I suppose you get used to it, and ignore it." You try. You try damned hard. But you never get used to it. It always wounds and hurts.

And the news got worse. It appeared that there was this whole other person Jesus Christ whose birthday a lot of people tended to confuse with mine. I was personally outraged. It was a long time before I forgave the Lord for that.

Then, aided by the booze, like a fool I tossed off one of those throwaway lines that would have been better thrown away. "Ah, Frank! I thought you were going to be down here fucking Lana.

I caught his drift, but I wasn't going to argue for a single second. Just get me to the Hampshire House, that's all I cared about. Besides, how could I say, "No, I'm not a prositute. I'm Mrs. Frank Sinatra out for an early morning walk in the rain"?

He always called me Daughter. It was to distinguish me from his sister Ava. I loved being called Daughter. It sounded so possessive, and to be possessed when you are a child is just a wonderful feeling. It makes you feel safe. It makes you feel loved.

The size of Frank Sinatra's penis had been on my mind for weeks. I don't know why it was bothering me so much, but it was.

When he fell down the stairs, he told people he'd had a stroke. He was just pissed out of his skull. I love Dirk, he is such a drama queen.

Poems are like people' I said 'There are not many authentic ones around.

In the picture, Ava Gardner's tousled black hair obscured her right eye, and her full, closed lips were pulled slightly to the right, resulting in something less than a smile. They looked as if they'd been smeared shut with red paint, though the photo was in black and white. It wasn't so much a fuck-me face as a I've-been-there-and-back look, the kind of expression you see only on the most expensive whores.

Some of the things that I regret most in my life happened when I was drinking. I’m just not good with alcohol. And I don’t give a damn what time of the day it is, I just drink too much.

But I must say, it's a lonely business fucking someone you no longer love. Especially a husband. Tough, funny, vulgar, cynical, it was a classic Ava Gardner line. It rolled off the tongue. I didn't want to lose it. The problem was I couldn't reconcile it with something she had told me earlier--that she was "even more in love with all three of my husbands the day I left them than the day we married." -author Peter Evans

We thought Bugles and a Tiger and its sequel, The Road Past Mandalay, plus Bhowani Junction, which was made into a movie starring Ava Gardner as a half-caste (or Chi Chi) East Indian and Stewart Granger playing an Indian Army

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In a perfect cinematic world we would’ve captured the bad guys in spectacular fashion with explosions, car chases, and a parting kiss. She would’ve been played by Ava Gardner, and I would’ve been played by Robert Taylor. I looked at her. “I was wrong.” She looked back at me, and I could feel her eyes on the side of my face.

fame gives you everything you never wanted.

The love she had felt for him in the past was still there within her, covered over now like a bandaged wound, not yet healed underneath and perhaps still easily reopened.

Ava Gardner. Blessed Ava. Wasn’t much about men could astonish Ava. Elegance and filth, immaculately intertwined. Dead at sixty-two, two years younger than me.

The year was 1952.” I clear my throat and look down at my paper. “It was summer, and Frank Sinatra was on the radio. Lana Turner and Ava Gardner were the starlets of the day. Stormy was eighteen. She was in the marching band, she was voted Best Legs, and she always had a date on Saturday night. On this particular night, she was on a date with a boy named Walt. On a dare, she went skinny-dipping in the town lake. Stormy never could turn down a dare.” Mr. Perelli laughs and says, “That’s right, she never could.” Other people murmur in agreement, “She never could.” “A farmer called the police, and when they shined their lights on the lake, Stormy told them to turn around before she would come out. She got a ride home in a police car that night.” “Not the first time or the last,” someone calls out, and everyone laughs, and I can feel my shoulders start to relax. “Stormy lived more life in one night than most people do their whole lives. She was a force of nature. She taught me that love--” My eyes well up and I start over. “Stormy taught me that love is about making brave choices every day. That’s what Stormy did. She always picked love; she always picked adventure. To her they were one and the same. And now she’s off on a new adventure, and we wish her well.

They acted because they loved acting, but also, let’s be honest here, to be noticed. All they wanted was to be seen. I’ve been thinking lately about immortality. What it means to be remembered, what I want to be remembered for, certain questions concerning memory and fame. I love watching old movies. I watch the faces of long-dead actors on the screen, and I think about how they’ll never truly die. I know that’s a cliché but it happens to be true. Not just the famous ones who everyone knows, the Clark Gables, the Ava Gardners, but the bit players, the maid carrying the tray, the butler, the cowboys in the bar, the third girl from the left in the nightclub. They’re all immortal to me. First we only want to be seen, but once we’re seen, that’s not enough anymore. After that, we want to be remembered.

Not just the famous ones who everyone knows, the Clark Gables, the Ava Gardners, but the bit players, the maid carrying the tray, the butler, the cowboys in the bar, the third girl from the left in the nightclub. They’re all immortal to me.

The surviving human beings there could do nothing but wait for the end to come. They chose different ways to live out their final days. That was the plot.** It was a dark movie offering no hope of salvation. (Though, watching it, Aomame reconfirmed her belief that everyone, deep in their hearts, is waiting for the end of the world to come.) ** On the Beach, the 1959 movie, director: Stanley Kramer, writer: John Paxton, starring: Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire & Anthony Perkins. On the Beach, the 1957 novel, writer: Nevil Shute.

Hollywood is loneliness beside the swimming pool.

Life, it keeps going. That's pretty much all it is when you boil it down: perpetual motion.

bothered. “I’m okay taking notes,” I said

She was infuriating, bawdy, frank, and unreasonable. She was also kind, affectionate, trusting, and often touching. And I adored her. --said by the author Peter Evans

I think the most vulgar thing about Hollywood is the way it believes its own gossip.

One cool morning—a rainstorm had swept through the night before; now the City of Angels sparkled like Eden itself—he was walking between soundstages in Culver City, carrying a cardboard cup of coffee, nodding to this glorious creature (dressed as a harem girl), then that glorious creature (a cowgirl), then that glorious creature (a secretary?)—they all smiled at him—when he ran into, of all people, an old pal of his from the Major Bowes days, a red-haired pianist who’d bounced around the Midwest in the 1930s, Lyle Henderson (Crosby would soon nickname him Skitch). Henderson was strolling with a creature much more glorious, if possible, than the three Sinatra had just encountered. She was tall, dark haired, with sleepy green eyes, killer cheekbones, and absurdly lush lips, lips he couldn’t stop staring at. Frankie! Henderson said, as they shook hands. His old chum was doing all right these days. Sinatra smiled, not at Henderson. The glorious creature smiled back bashfully, but with a teasing hint of directness in her dark eyes. The pianist—he was doing rehearsal duty at the studio—then got to say the six words that someone had to say, sometime, but that he and he alone got to say for the first time in history on this sparkling morning: Frank Sinatra, this is Ava Gardner.

I've been thinking lately about immortality. What it means to be remembered, what I want to be remembered for, certain questions concerning memory and fame. I love watching old movies. I watch the faces of long-dead actors on the screen, and I think about how they'll never truly die. I know that's a cliché but it happens to be true. Not just the famous ones who everyone knows, the Clark Gables, the Ava Gardners, but the bit players, the maid carrying the tray, the butler, the cowboys in the bar, the third girl from the left in the nightclub. They're all immortal to me. First we only want to be seen, but once we're seen, that's not enough anymore. After that, we want to be remembered. (187)

Why do you think that?” she asked sharply. It was the kind of question Peter Viertel had warned me about. When they were making The Sun Also Rises, in which she played Hemingway’s Lady Brett Ashley, he told me: “I’d show her the script, she’d ask something innocuous like, ‘Would Lady Brett say that line?’ or ‘Does Lady Brett need to say anything here? Jake [Barnes, the narrator and hero of The Sun Also Rises, played by Tyrone Power] will understand from her look what she’s thinking. There will be no need to spell it out.’ “And suddenly she’s embroiled you in an almighty argument about the script, or about the book you’re trying to write for her. You can’t reason with her because she never approaches anything intellectually. She is the most intuitive woman I know.

Entonces comprendía que su amor por aquellos objetos, gracias a los cuales ahora vivía y de los que a lo largo de los años había obtenido una felicidad diferente a todas las otras modalidades posibles de la felicidad, era una de las cosas más importantes de su vida, en la cual cada vez quedaban menos cosas importantes, y las empezó a contar: la amistad, el café, el cigarro, el ron, hacer el amor de vez en cuando —ay, Tamara, ay, Ava Gardner— y la literatura. Y los libros, claro, sumó al final.

In a perfect cinematic world we would've captured the bad guys in spectacular fashion with explosions, car chases, and a parting kiss. She would've been played by Ava Gardner, and I would've been played by Robert Taylor.

My accent was as Tarheel as it gets. That's incomprehensible to anyone who lives more than two whoops and a holler outside of the state of North Carolina.

... I said something about the way some of the longshoremen smelled. They smelled just godawful, especially when they'd just come back from their night shifts. Mama said: That's what money smells like, honey. You still wanna be rich?

... keep telling her how beautiful she looks. Keep on saying that. How beautiful she looks. Lay it on thick. She won't believe you, she's too smart to fall for blarney, but it's what she wants to hear. It's the tribute you must always pay to great beauties when they grow old. Remember it's always the cameraman who grows old, never the star.

What I'd really like to say about stardom is it gave me everything i never wanted.

What is it they say? The fucking you get for the fucking you got?

But I must say, it’s a lonely business fucking someone you no longer love.

I grab a book. I sit in the corner. My eyes fall on the page, and I disappear into the ink.

It would be amazing if there were a reason for all this. A reason for her misfortune, a reason for her captivity and abuse, a reason for her return. I'm skeptical at first as we steep in the contemplative silence. But then I remember reasons are human inventions.

Maybe joy is even more potent when you've known the depth of its opposite.

Love is an excruciating delicacy. Maybe that is its force.

imagine what it would be like to be ridiculed and victim-blamed

Funny how we're not just our features, we're the areas between.

She was beautiful, all charm and bright light, and as I looked down at her, her eyes sparking with mischief, I knew I was a goner. Ava Gardner might very well be my undoing.

It’s like, mind and body work in tandem, so she thinks she’s sick and then she convinces herself and it manifests in her body, so she actually is sick at this point. Her fake Lyme disease has totally crippled her for real.

Tonight it’s Wexican food. You know, corporate white people faking Mexican

Maybe joy is even more potent when you’ve known the depth of its opposite.

Elliott’s Saturday is Scarlett O’Hara’s tomorrow.

but the most glamorous was undeniably Theresa’s granny, Margaret, Duchess of Argyll. In fact she was probably the most glamorous woman I’ve ever met. Margaret had the looks of Ava Gardner, the balls of Bette Davis and the sex drive of Peter Stringfellow.

His book For Whom the Bell Tolls was an instant success in the summer of 1940, and afforded him the means to live in style at his villa outside of Havana with his new wife Mary Welsh, whom he married in 1946. It was during this period that he started getting headaches and gaining weight, frequently becoming depressed. Being able to shake off his problems, he wrote a series of books on the Land, Air and Sea, and later wrote The Old Man and the Sea for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in May 1954. Hemingway on a trip to Africa where he barely survived two successive airplane crashes. Returning to Cuba, Ernest worked reshaping the recovered work and wrote his memoir, A Moveable Feast. He also finished True at First Light and The Garden of Eden. Being security conscious, he stored his works in a safe deposit box at a bank in Havana. His home Finca Vigía had become a hub for friends and even visiting tourists. It was reliably disclosed to me that he frequently enjoyed swinger’s parties and orgies at his Cuban home. In Spain after divorcing Frank Sinatra Hemingway introduced Ava Gardner to many of the bullfighters he knew and in a free for all, she seduced many of hotter ones. After Ava Gardner’s affair with the famous Spanish bullfighter Luis Miguel Dominguín crashed, she came to Cuba and stayed at Finca Vigía, where she had what was termed to be a poignant relationship with Ernest. Ava Gardner swam nude in the pool, located down the slope from the Hemingway house, after which he told his staff that the water was not to be emptied. An intimate friendship grew between Hemingway’s forth and second wife, Mary and Pauline. Pauline often came to Finca Vigia, in the early 1950s, and likewise Mary made the crossing of the Florida Straits, back to Key West several times. The ex-wife and the current wife enjoyed gossiping about their prior husbands and lovers and had choice words regarding Ernest. In 1959, Hemingway was in Cuba during the revolution, and was delighted that Batista, who owned the nearby property, that later became the location of the dismal Pan Americana Housing Development, was overthrown. He shared the love of fishing with Fidel Castro and remained on good terms with him. Reading the tea leaves, he decided to leave Cuba after hearing that Fidel wanted to nationalize the properties owned by Americans and other foreign nationals. In the summer of 1960, while working on a manuscript for Life magazine, Hemingway developed dementia becoming disorganized and confused. His eyesight had been failing and he became despondent and depressed. On July 25, 1960, he and his wife Mary left Cuba for the last time. He never retrieved his books or the manuscripts that he left in the bank vault. Following the Bay of Pigs Invasion, the Cuban government took ownership of his home and the works he left behind, including an estimated 5,000 books from his personal library. After years of neglect, his home, which was designed by the Spanish architect Miguel Pascual y Baguer in 1886, has now been largely restored as the Hemingway Museum. The museum, overlooking San Francisco de Paula, as well as the Straits of Florida in the distance, houses much of his work as well as his boat housed near his pool.