Bette Davis Quotes

When a man gives his opinion, he's a man. When a woman gives her opinion, she's a bitch.

There comes a time in every woman's life when the only thing that helps is a glass of champagne.

If you have never been hated by your child, you have never been a parent.

Old age ain't no place for sissies.

It's better to be hated for who you are, than to be loved for someone you're not. It's a sign of your worth sometimes, if you're hated by the right people.

The key to life is accepting challenges. Once someone stops doing this, he's dead.

You should know me well enough by now to know I don't ask for things I don't think I can get.

Love is not enough. It must be the foundation, the cornerstone- but not the complete structure. It is much too pliable, to yielding.

Everybody has a heart. Except some people.

Pleasure of love lasts but a moment, Pain of love lasts a lifetime.

I'm the nicest goddamn dame that ever lived.

I was thought to be 'stuck up.' I wasn't. I was just sure of myself. This is and always has been an unforgivable quality to the unsure.

If everybody likes you, you're pretty dull.

You will never be happier than you expect. To change your happiness, change your expectation.

I am just too much.

A sure way to lose happiness, I found, is to want it at the expense of everything else.

I'de luv to kiss ya but I just washed my hair.

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.

This became a credo of mine...attempt the impossible in order to improve your work.

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.

To fulfill a dream, to be allowed to sweat over lovely labor, to be given the chance to create, is the meat and potatoes of life. The money is the gravy.

Getting old is not for sissies.

Basically, I believe the world is a jungle, and if it's not a bit of a jungle in the home, a child cannot possibly be fit to enter the outside world.

I have been uncompromising, peppery, intractable, monomaniacal, tactless, volatile, and oftentimes disagreeable... I suppose I'm larger than life.

Life is the past, the present and the perhaps.

I will not retire while I've still got my legs and my makeup box.

Brought up to respect the conventions, love had to end in marriage. I'm afraid it did.

If you've never been hated by your child, you've never been a parent.

Remember the great film with Bette Davis, All About Eve? There's a scene after the scheming Eve steals Margo's role through trickery & then gets this magnificent review. Margo of course is effing & blinding all over the place. And crying. Her director rushes into her house, puts his arms around her & says, "I ran all the way". That's what I want.

I never wished I’d been a man. I always felt like a woman and wanted to be a woman. I wanted to be fulfilled professionally and personally, as a woman. There are some who might say I had penis envy, but I only had penis admiration.

Success only breeds a new goal

My passions were all gathered together like fingers that made a fist. Drive is considered aggression today; I knew it then as purpose.

To Bette Davis, Gena Rowlands, Romy Schneider... To all actresses who have played actresses, to all women who act, to all men who act and become women, to all the people who want to be mothers. To my mother. - Dedication, Todo Sobre Mi Madre

I'd like ta kiss ya, but I just washed my hair.

I have been uncompromising, peppery, intractable, monomaniacal, tactless, volatile, and offtimes disagreeable. I suppose I am larger than life.

Oh Jerry, don't let's ask for the moon. We have the stars. - Now, Voyager

Getting old ain't for sissies.

It's better to be HATED for who you ARE then Loved for who you ARE NOT!

I survived because I was tougher than anybody else.

Old age is no place for sissies!

In this business, until you're known as a monster, you're not a star

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.

Two people, two hands, and two songs, in this case "Big Shot" and "Bette Davis Eyes." The lyrics of the two songs provided no commentary, honest or ironic, on the proceedings. They were merely there and always underfoot, the insistent gray muck that was pop culture. It stuck to our shoes and we tracked it through our lives.

Always be a first-rate version of yourself, instead of a second-rate version of somebody else.” – Judy Garland

When I heard the gunshots, though, I knew - knew beyond the shadow of a doubt - that somewhere in Los Angeles Bette Davis was on the prowl and packing heat. ("Shadows From The Screen")

Smoke was a person with a sense of history. Do you know what I mean?" ...in truth, I DID know what she meant. Da Vinci, Martin Luther King, Jr., Genghis Kahn, Abraham Lincoln, Bette Davis - if you read their definitive biographies, you learned even when they were a month old, cooing in some wobbly crib in the middle of nowhere, they already had something historic about them. The way other kids had baseball, long division, Hot Wheels, and hula hoops, these kids had History and thus tended to be prone to colds, unpopular, sometimes plagued with a physical deformity (Lord Byron's clubfoot, Maugham's severe stutter, for example), which pushed them into exile in their heads. It was there they began to dream of human anatomy, civil rights, conquering Asia, a lost speech and being (within a span of four years) a jezebel, a marked woman, a little fox and an old maid.

Once the love bug wears off, as it inevitably does, you are shocked to discover that you really didn't know the object of your affections at all. We know this to be so, even as we repeat the same mistake over and over and over.

The weak are the most treacherous of us all. They come to the strong and drain them. They are bottomless. They are insatiable. They are always parched and always bitter. They are everyone’s concern and like vampires they suck our life’s blood.

But Finn was like no one else. He could be funny, teasing, informative all at once. I was discovering that smart, engaged dialogue with a man is extremely erotic. Cleverness is an aphrodisiac.

Old Age Ain't For Sissies. Taken from a Bette Davis quote.

Old Bette Davis movies are all she watches now. There’s one where Bette Davis’s character goes blind, and as the credits rolled my mother said, ‘Must be what they mean when they talk about Bette Davis eyes.

I used to be Snow White but then I drifted.

Tell him not to smoke in your apartment. Tell him to get out. At first he protests. But slowly, slowly, he leaves, pulling up the collar on his expensive beige raincoat, like an old and haggard Robert Culp. Slam the door like Bette Davis. Love drains from you, takes with it much of your blood sugar and water weight. You are like a house slowly losing its electricity, the fans slowing, the lights dimming and flickering; the clocks stop and go and stop.

The word "slut" has been invoked in the public discourse as an ugly slur. But Langella's book celebrates sluttiness as a worthy -- even noble -- way of life... When Bette Davis wants to have "racy phone conversations...rife with foreplay," he agrees because how could you not? When Elizabeth Taylor says, "Come on up, baby, and put me to sleep," who is he to resist? (He does make her chase him first.) By his cheerful debauchery, Langella reveals something certain ommmentators have obscured: sluts are the best---hungry for experience and generous wih themselves in its pursuit.

I think I showed my restraint by not pulling her hair out by the roots.

I'd like to kiss ya, but I just washed my hair.

Funny business, a woman's career. The things you drop on your way up the ladder-- so you can move faster-- you forget you'll need them when you go back to being a woman. That's one career all females have in common whether we like it or not. Being a woman. Sooner or later, we've got to work at it, no matter what other careers we've had or wanted. And in the last analysis nothing is any good unless you can look up just before dinner-- or turn around in bed-- and there he is. Without that you're not a woman. You're someone with a French provincial office-- or a book full of clippings. But you're not a woman. Slow curtain. The end. (from "All About Eve")

Looking is an important part of Stanwyck's acting: many performers have beautiful eyes (for example, Henry Fonda), or use their eyes expressively (most remarkably, perhaps, Bette Davis), but few use them so attentively to observe and survey others and the world [as Stanwyck].

I was thinking how most people don't make you feel much of anything at all. Don't make you feel like time spent with them has grace, like every moment in their company is a gift. But Finn did. Finn, my midsummer night's dream.

Instincts Exist for a Reason—Follow Them

Don’t Be Afraid to Face Your Fears; They Won’t Go Away Until You Do.

Anything cruel I do is mental, not physical

Through the early 1930s, Barbara Stanwyck established her reputation in a field overflowing with other young Broadway starlets: Bette Davis, Miriam Hopkins, Katharine Hepburn, Claudette Colbert, Joan Blondell. Barbara was lower-keyed and less mannered than Davis and Hepburn; less glamorous than Colbert. She was “real,” and she also proved to be the personification of no-nonsense professionalism, making her popular with directors and coworkers alike.

Bette Davis lived long enough to hear the Kim Carnes song, 'Bette Davis Eyes'. The lyrics to that song were not very interesting. But the fact of the song was the proof of an acknowledgement that in the twentieth century we lived through an age of immense romantic personalities larger than life, yet models for it, too - for good or ill. Like twin moons, promising a struggle and an embrace, the Davis eyes would survive her - and us. Kim Carnes has hardly had a consistent career, but that one song - sluggish yet surging, druggy and dreamy - became an instant classic. It's like the sigh of the islanders when they behold their Kong. And I suspect it made the real eyes smile, whatever else was on their mind.

If you think about it, people spend a lot of time trying to hold on to things that are gone.

Assuming you live through it, the best thing about falling apart is you get to put yourself back together.

Burn my eyebrows and call me Bette. But if I’ve got eyebrows, don’t call me Bette—call me Davis. Then let’s make love like The Bad Sister.

But nothing's really free, is it? People always make you pay one way or another.

I gave her a look that would exterminate lice.

It has been my experience that one cannot, in any shape or form, depend on human relations for any lasting reward. It is only work that truly satisfies.

One nurse told me to say please when I asked her to do something. She should consider herself luck to be in one piece today.

I believe in giving as honest an answer as I can. Because perhaps if people spent more time being honest with each other, especially with children, there would be less unhappiness in the world.

It might interest you to know," Tully says, "that there's a reason people build miniatures. Doesn't matter if it's guys laying out model railroads or women decorating dollhouses. It's about control. It's about reinventing reality." [...] "Some people get a lot of satisfaction in creating a little world they can escape to. In making things turn out the way they want, at least in their dreams.

After these walk-ons, she would banter with announcer Ken Niles and perhaps indulge in more stargazing. In her memoir, radio actress Mary Jane Higby recalls working the show. The “underpaid radio actors” soon took to calling themselves “the Gay Ad-Libbers.” They “would circle the microphone, trying to simulate people having a marvelous time. ‘What fun to be here!’ they would cry. ‘My, doesn’t Myrna Loy look gorgeous! Whoops, there’s Bette Davis!

we could relate to Dickens and Twain and Shakespeare and Ephron and Capra and Hitchcock—all those whom she considered so singularly excellent at the craft of storytelling. Mom loved a good zinger, loved a good turn, and she loved a good story.

I do have a phone in New York. One night—at one in the morning!—I was awakened by Miss Bette Davis, the actress, calling from California to tell me how much she admired something of mine. She had no idea that it was anything later than ten o’clock at night where I was. “I don’t mind that, but in March, just before I left, the phone rang and a voice said: ‘We are going to castrate you and then kill you.’ All I could say to that was: ‘I think you have the wrong number.’ I’m quite sure he did.…

My energies knew no bounds and I became more and more interested in civic causes, the first of which was The Tailwaggers. It was an organization that cared for abandoned and lost dogs. Its English progenitor had been started by the Duke of Windsor—now married to the lady at King’s Bench. A lifelong dog lover, I became president of the group and during my tenure of office we trained dogs for the blind. The work became infinitely satisfying and accomplished a twofold purpose. In order to raise money,

Still, they must have got a few things right," Malcolm says. His green eyes sparkle. "You turned out beautifully, if I may say so." "Oh, you can say it," I reply, taking a drag off my cigarette. "Whether or not I'll believe you is something else entirely.

Of Human Bondage?" Will said quickly, moving just out of sight for a moment and forcing Charlie to move to the edge of the dining area to see him. He tossed one arch look over his shoulder as he reached up to grab that book, and even knowing it was an act, Charlie felt himself tensing. His eyes fell on the leather cuff at Will's wrist, as they were probably meant to. "Kinky." Charlie's throat locked. "I'm not..." "Into Bette Davis? I know, a lot of people find her scary at first, but after awhile you really start to get into her." The completely reasonable tone was at odds with the wicked light in the kid's eyes, the way his lips were curved up, how he held his breath when Charlie blinked and frowned, replaying the insane words until they made sense. Until he remembered that Bette Davis was in the film version of that novel, until he could finally take his gaze off that wide leather band. His face was burning. "Smartass," he muttered, completely mystified when being called a smartass made Will hop in place, since Will had already made it clear that he had a brain under all that hair and glitter.

We worked so hard,” [Joan Blondell] said, “and hardly ever had a day off . . . Saturday was a working day and we usually worked right into Sunday morning.” Joan’s good nature may have worked against her in the long run. While fellow Warner Brothers workers Bette Davis, James Cagney, Olivia de Havilland and Humphrey Bogart fought like lions for better roles and more creative input, Joan took things in stride, at least through the early 1930s. “I just sailed through things, took the scripts I was given, did what I was told. I couldn’t afford to go on suspension—my family needed what I could make.

Sublime Books The Known World, by Edward P. Jones The Buried Giant, by Kazuo Ishiguro A Thousand Trails Home, by Seth Kantner House Made of Dawn, by N. Scott Momaday Faithful and Virtuous Night, by Louise Glück The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy, by Robert Bly The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman Unfortunately, It Was Paradise, by Mahmoud Darwish Collected Fictions, by Jorge Luis Borges, trans. Andrew Hurley The Xenogenesis Trilogy, by Octavia E. Butler Map: Collected and Last Poems, by Wisława Szymborska In the Lateness of the World, by Carolyn Forché Angels, by Denis Johnson Postcolonial Love Poem, by Natalie Diaz Hope Against Hope, by Nadezhda Mandelstam Exhalation, by Ted Chaing Strange Empire, by Joseph Kinsey Howard Tookie’s Pandemic Reading Deep Survival, by Laurence Gonzales The Lost City of the Monkey God, by Douglas Preston The House of Broken Angels, by Luis Alberto Urrea The Heartsong of Charging Elk, by James Welch Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, by Elisabeth Tova Bailey Let’s Take the Long Way Home, by Gail Caldwell The Aubrey/Maturin Novels, by Patrick O’Brian The Ibis Trilogy, by Amitav Ghosh The Golden Wolf Saga, by Linnea Hartsuyker Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky Coyote Warrior, by Paul VanDevelder Incarceration Felon, by Reginald Dwayne Betts Against the Loveless World, by Susan Abulhawa Waiting for an Echo, by Christine Montross, M.D. The Mars Room, by Rachel Kushner The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander This Is Where, by Louise K. Waakaa’igan I Will Never See the World Again, by Ahmet Altan Sorrow Mountain, by Ani Pachen and Adelaide Donnelley American Prison, by Shane Bauer Solitary, by Albert Woodfox Are Prisons Obsolete?, by Angela Y. Davis 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows, by Ai Weiwei Books contain everything worth knowing except what ultimately matters. —Tookie * * * If you are interested in the books on these lists, please seek them out at your local independent bookstore. Miigwech! Acknowledgments

Her hair is Harlow gold Her lips are sweet surprise Her hands are never cold She's got Bette Davis eyes She'll turn the music on you You won't have to think twice She's pure as New York snow She got Bette Davis eyes And she'll tease you, she'll unease you All the better just to please you She's precocious, and she knows just what it Takes to make a pro blush She got Greta Garbo's standoff sighs, she's got Bette Davis eyes She'll let you take her home It whets her appetite She'll lay you on the throne She got Bette Davis eyes She'll take a tumble on you Roll you like you were dice Until you come out blue She's got Bette Davis eyes She'll expose you, when she snows you Off your feet with the crumbs, she throws you She's ferocious and she knows just what it Takes to make a pro blush All the boys think she's a spy, she's got Bette Davis eyes And she'll tease you, she'll unease you All the better just to please you She's precocious, and she knows just what it Takes to make a pro blush All the boys think she's a spy, she's got Bette Davis eyes She'll tease you She'll unease you Just to please you She's got Bette Davis eyes She'll expose you When she snows you She knows you, she's got Bette Davis Eyes

Tully starts in again. 'See, the hidden value can go way deeper than sentimental attachment. Sometimes you feel it down to your soul. Like maybe you're the one person who appreciates a work of art that everybody else hates. [...] This thing you treasure, this thing nobody else wants, could also be what you'd call organic. It could be alive. [...] That's what falling in love is, isn't it? Discovering the hidden value in someone.

When I was a kid I adored Katharine Hepburn, especially when she played Jo, the ballsy sister in Little Women. All the kids in school started calling me “Jo.” I also loved Barbara Stanwyck, Ann Sheridan, Bette Davis, Claire Trevor—I didn’t know them but after seeing them in so many movies, I felt like I knew them. They weren’t feminists, they were just strong women, and I always admired anyone who had some guts. All those sweet, quiet, polite, ladylike little things just bored me to death. Back then there were so many wonderful women’s stories being filmed, and so many strong actresses. But by the time I started doing movies they were mostly making men’s stories. It has always saddened me that I never got to work with directors like George Cukor and William Wyler, directors who could really pull such marvelous performances from actresses." - Jane Russell

A point often ignored in cinema history studies of [Bette] Davis,” wrote Jim Parish and Don Stanke years later of Housewife, “is that Ann Dvorak, who plays the film’s title role, was established as a strong dramatic actress long before Bette, and it was she who set the standard for battling with the studio for better roles. In her quiet performance as Nan Wilson Reynolds, it is Miss Dvorak and not the already mannered Bette, who woos the audience’s attention and affection. It is Dvorak who provides the proper artistic control for the feature…” The big difference between the two actresses was maturity. Bette, in these early movies, was very rough around the gills; she became polished, but always tended to slip into campy tirades. Dvorak was a natural; she was intense, but always in control, even in highly emotional situations.

[Joan Blondell] biographer, Matthew Kennedy, quotes her as admitting, “If I had taken myself more seriously . . . if I had fought for better roles as, say, Bette Davis did . . . I think I might have been a damned good dramatic actress. But it was just my way; I don’t think I ever had the security of feeling confident in myself, really, ever. I used to think, ‘I’m just lucky to be here!

There were giants striding the screen in the 1930s and ’40s: four actresses so talented, hardworking and versatile that they became laws unto themselves. Joan Crawford and Bette Davis have also become high-camp figures of fun, as they both had such wildly theatrical offscreen lives, and their performances could sometimes veer into self-parody. But Barbara Stanwyck and Claudette Colbert stand the test of time in each and every film: our memories of them are not overshadowed by scandals or vituperative daughters. One rarely sees a Stanwyck or Colbert drag queen. But these ladies were fully the equal—sometimes the superior—of Davis and Crawford.

When someone says, “Happy birthday and many happy returns of the day,” I usually say, “If God takes up my option.” In the motion picture business there were once options, usually yearly. If taken up, your contract was extended for another year by the studio. It is appalling to realize that God has taken up my option for seventy-eight years.

my future was so bright, I was practically self-tanning.

Life is just a bowl of scaries!

Obviously, your day has been far more wretched than mine.” “It’s not a contest,

She could summon security if she wanted to, or a squadron of flying monkeys.

A Star Is Born was remade two more times, with everybody from Judy Garland to Barbra Streisand playing the part based on Colleen Moore.

That man’s so far in the closet, he thinks he’s a coat hanger.

The country was still smoking like Bette Davis in her prime.

Some people get a lot of satisfaction in creating a little world they can escape to. In making things turn out the way they want, at least in their dreams.

Everybody has a heart. Except some people. —BETTE DAVIS, All About Eve

It’s true what the natives say. Every time someone takes your picture, the camera steals a little bit of your soul.” “That explains Bette Davis.

You know what nostalgia is, don’t you? It’s basically a matter of recalling the fun without reliving the pain.

Old age is not for sissies, as Bette Davis used to say.