Gene Tierney Quotes

1. I was not cut out to be a rebel.


2. Houses are one of my passions. I probably should have been an interior decorator.

3. I was plunged into what was known as the debutante social whirl. This was one of the ways fathers justified their own hard work and sacrifices.

4. Children don't understand about people loving each other and then suddenly not.

5. In later years, I craved foods that were almost always fattening.


6. I used to annoy my father by telling him how much I felt luck was with me.

7. In my early days in Hollywood I tried to be economical. I designed my own clothes, much to my mother's distress.

8. I followed the same diet for 20 years, eliminating starches, living on salads, lean meat and small portions.

9. It is difficult to write about any form of mental disease, especially your own, without sounding as if you were examining a bug under glass.


10. I was going to live on my salary or go down swinging.

11. My departure from Hollywood was described as a walk-out. No one understood that I was cracking up.

12. Jealousy is, I think, the worst of all faults because it makes a victim of both parties.

13. My mother would not talk to me for weeks, would not stay under my roof for as long as I was married to Oleg.


14. Life is a little like a message in a bottle, to be carried by the winds and the tides.


15. The Howard Hughes I knew began to change after his plane crash in 1941.

16. I was fortunate enough to work under directors who were, most of them, brilliant, emotional men.

17. The Hollywood structure was monopolistic, run by four or five big studios.





18. Everyone should see Hollywood once, I think, through the eyes of a teenage girl who has just passed a screen test.

19. The main cause of my difficulties stemmed from the tragedy of my daughter's unsound birth and my inability to face my feelings.

20. We cannot calculate the numbers of people who left, fled or were fished out of Europe just ahead of the Holocaust.

21. Men are wonderful. I adore them. They always give you the benefit of the doubt.

22. As an actress, I was trained to show emotion I did not feel, or no emotion at all.

23. The word actress has always seemed less a job description to me than a title.




24. I admire anyone who rids himself of an addiction.

25. Throughout my career, I was to be cast as a frontier girl, an aristocrat, an Arabian, a Eurasian, a Polynesian, and a Chinese.

26. Chaplin was notoriously strict with his sons and rarely gave them spending money.

27. There were days that I worked all the time, without a layoff, or a rest, finishing one picture and reporting for another sometimes on the same day.

28. Day after day, I spent long afternoons in the talent pool, being told how to walk, how to talk, how to sit.


29. Unlike the stage, I never found it helpful to be good in a bad movie.


30. About my career I was serious and earnest, sometimes impatient.

31. Trying to make order out of my life was like trying to pick up a jellyfish.

32. For years it never occurred to me to question the judgment of those in charge at the studio.

33. Fonda and Gary Cooper had the best sense of timing of all the actors I knew.

34. What a different world it was when I first sailed for Europe in 1930, with my mother, sister, and brother to spend six months abroad.

35. Hollywood can be hard on women, but it did not cause my problems.

36. I have a role now that I think becomes me. I am a grandmother.

37. I always tried to play my hunches.


38. When I met Jack Kennedy, he was a serious young man with a dream. He was not a womanizer, not as I understood the term.


39. I am not the kind of woman who excuses her mistakes while reminding us of what used to be.

40. I had no romantic interest in Gable. I considered him an older man.

41. When my mood was high, I seemed normal, even buoyant. I felt smarter. I had secrets. I could see God in a light bulb.


42. Where there is hope, there is no despair.

43. I dated dozens of young men, had fun with all, made commitments to none.

44. I do not recall spending long hours in front of a mirror loving my reflection.

45. Some women feel the best cure for a broken heart is a new beau.




46. I hole up now and then and do nothing for days but read.

47. In the months leading up to World War II, there was a tendency among many Americans to talk absently about the trouble in Europe. Nothing that happened an ocean away seemed very threatening.

48. I knew I could not cope with the future unless I was able to rediscover the past.




49. I had known Cole Porter in Hollywood and New York, spent many a warm hour at his home, and met the talented and original people who were drawn to him.

50. I loved to eat. For all of Hollywood's rewards, I was hungry for most of those 20 years.

51. I approached everything, my job, my family, my romances, with intensity.


52. I learned quickly at Columbia that the only eye that mattered was the one on the camera.


53. Eccentric behavior is not routinely noticed around a movie set.

54. I needed to be accepted, not humored. I intended to act.

55. I was fine when it came to cheering up others, not so fine with myself.


56. I used up every cent I earned as an actress.

57. It was the fashion of the time, still is, to feel that all actors are neurotic, or they would not be actors.

58. I remember the 1940s as a time when we were united in a way known only to that generation. We belonged to a common cause - the war.

59. Those who become mentally ill often have a history of chronic pain.


60. I ask myself: Would I have been any worse off if I had stayed home or lived on a farm instead of shock treatments and medication?


61. I existed in a world that never is - the prison of the mind.

62. I had been offered a Hollywood contract before my 18th birthday. It gave me the spark I needed.

63. I simply did not want my face to be my talent.


64. I'm not sure I can explain the nature of Jack Kennedy's charm, but he took life just as it came.

65. Wealth, beauty and fame are transient. When those are gone, little is left except the need to be useful.

66. Rehearsals and screening rooms are often unreliable because they can't provide the chemistry between an audience and what appears on the stage or screen.




67. When you have spent an important part of your life playing "Let's Pretend", it's often easy to see symbolism where none exists.

68. Cars, furs and gems were not my weaknesses.


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