Your audience gives you everything you need. They tell you. There is no director who can direct you like an audience.

Let the world know you as you are, not as you think you should be.

Let the world know you as you are, not as you think you should be, because sooner or later, if you are posing, you will forget the pose, and then where are you?

You think beautiful girls are going to stay in style forever? I should say not! Any minute now they're going to be out! Finished! Then it'll be my turn!

I'm a bad woman, but I'm damn good company.

Love is like a card trick. After you know how it works, it's no fun any more.

Any woman who can’t say a four-letter word sometimes is deceitful.

I never liked the men I loved, and never loved the men I liked.

I'm a bagel on a plate full of onion rolls!

Without love it is like having a good song without an audience.

Wrong is for other people.

The only person you should compete with is you.

If you construct a room in paint, you haunt it. Your life rests in every stroke. So paint only the rooms that you can bear to occupy forever. Or paint the stars instead.

I don't have a warm personal enemy left. They've all died off. I miss them terribly because they helped define me.

I have a nice family and I'm well rounded.

The world is made up, for the most part, of fools and knaves, both irreconcileable foes to truth.

The function of a newspaper in a democracy is to stand as a sort of chronic opposition to the reigning quacks. The minute it begins to out-whoop them it forfeits its character and becomes ridiculous.

The fact that educated white women automatically assume that we have similar backgrounds annoys me. We don't. I feel like I'm in a certain kind of drag.

We prize books, and they prize them most who are themselves wise.

Absence makes the heart grow fonder. Prolonged absence makes the heart forget.

As a result of the sacred ordinances performed in the holy house of God, no light need be permanently extinguished, no voice permanently stilled, no place in our heart permanently left vacant.