Rosemary Clooney

"I'll keep working as long as I live because singing has taken on the feeling of joy that I had when I started, when my only responsibility was to sing well. "

Rosemary Clooney

Jean-Michel Basquiat

"I start a picture and I finish it. I don't think about art while I work. I try to think about life."

Jean-Michel Basquiat


(photo by Mark Sink)

Barbara Streisand

Barbara Streisand quotes:


I am simple, complex, generous, selfish, unattractive, beautiful, lazy, and driven.

Around people I don't know, I'm totally at a loss.

I go by instinct--I don't worry about experience.

I arrived in Hollywood without having my nose fixed, my teeth capped, or my name changed. That is very gratifying to me.

The audience is the best judge of anything. They cannot be lied to. Truth brings them closer. A moment that lags - they're gonna cough.

I'm not that ambitious any more. I just like my privacy. I wish I really wasn't talked about at all.

How I wish we lived in a time when laws were not necessary to safeguard us from discrimination.

You have got to discover you, what you do, and trust it.

It is every woman's dream to be some man's dream woman.

What is exciting is not for one person to be stronger than the other... but for two people to have met their match and yet they are equally as stubborn, as obstinate, as passionate, as crazy as the other.

There is nothing more important in life than love.

June Mansfield

June Mansfield was Henry Miller's wife. Anais Nin wrote, upon meeting June for the first time, in December 1931 "A startingly white face, burning eyes. June Mansfield, Henry's wife. As she came towards me from the darkness of my garden into the light of the doorway I saw for the first time the most beautiful woman on earth. Years ago, when I tried to imagine a pure beauty, I had created an image in my mind of just that woman. I had even imagined she would be Jewish. I knew long ago the color of her skin, her profile, her teeth. Her beauty drowned me. As I sat in front of her I felt that I would do anything she asked of me. Henry faded, She was color, brilliance, strangeness."

Javier Bardem

"The only thing I can do is act, but it's not something I even feel comfortable doing. It costs me a lot, because I'm a shy person, even if I don't look it. "

- Javier Bardem

Elizabeth Taylor

Elizabeth Taylor Quotes:


Big girls need big diamonds.

I adore wearing gems, but not because they are mine. You can't possess radiance, you can only admire it.

I don't pretend to be an ordinary housewife.

I have a woman's body and a child's emotions.

I suppose when they reach a certain age some men are afraid to grow up. It seems the older the men get, the younger their new wives get.

I sweat real sweat and I shake real shakes.

I've always admitted that I'm ruled by my passions.

It's not the having, it's the getting.

Reese Witherspoon

Photograph by Mario Testino; gown by Nina Ricci; "Vogue" Novmber 2008

“Many people worry so much about managing their careers, but rarely spend half that much energy managing their LIVES. I want to make my life, not just my job, the best it can be. The rest will work itself out.”

- Reese Witherspoon

Carole Lombard

“I live by a man's code, designed to fit a man's world, yet at the same time I never forget that a woman's first job is to choose the right shade of lipstick.”

- Carole Lombard

Madonna

Madonna quotes:


“I am my own experiment. I am my own work of art.”

“A lot of people are afraid to say what they want. That's why they don't get what they want.”

“Sometimes you have to be a bitch to get things done.”

“I'm tough, ambitious, and I know exactly what I want. If that makes me a bitch, okay.”

“When I'm hungry, I eat. When I'm thirsty, I drink. When I feel like saying something, I say it.”

“Everyone probably thinks that I'm a raving nymphomaniac, that I have an insatiable sexual appetite, when the truth is I'd rather read a book.”

“I stand for freedom of expression, doing what you believe in, and going after your dreams.”

“Better to live one year as a tiger, than a hundred as a sheep.”

“Never forget to dream."

Nazimova

Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf quotes:

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

As a woman, I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.

A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.

A masterpiece is something said once and for all, stated, finished, so that it's there complete in the mind, if only at the back.

Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends can only read the title.

Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible.

I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.

I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.

I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

I want the concentration and the romance, and the worlds all glued together, fused, glowing: have no time to waste any more on prose.

If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.

Language is wine upon the lips.

It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.

Marilyn Monroe

Marilyn Monroe quotes:


It's all make believe, isn't it?

If I'd observed all the rules, I'd never have got anywhere.

I'm very definitely a woman and I enjoy it.

I don't know who invented high heels, but all women owe him a lot.

I don't mind living in a man's world as long as I can be a woman in it.

I don't want to make money. I just want to be wonderful.

I'm trying to find myself as a person, sometimes that's not easy to do. Millions of people live their entire lives without finding themselves. But it is something I must do. The best way for me to find myself as a person is to prove to myself that I am an actress.

I am trying to prove to myself that I am a person. Then may be I'll convince myself that I'm an actress.

People respect you because they feel you've survived hard times and endured, and although you've become famous, you haven't become phony.

Creativity has got to start with humanity and when you're a human being, you feel, you suffer.

I love to do the things the censors won't pass.

hat good is it being Marilyn Monroe? Why can't I just be an ordinary woman? A woman who can have a family ... I'd settle for just one baby. My own baby.

I have too many fantasies to be a housewife.... I guess I am a fantasy.

A career is wonderful thing, but you can't snuggle up to it on a cold night.

It's better to be unhappy alone than unhappy with someone.

Mae West

Lee Miller

“Other people tend to value you the way you value yourself.”

- Lee Miller


(photo by Man Ray)

Joan Crawford

Joan Crawford quotes:

I have always known what I wanted, and that was beauty... in every form.

I love playing bitches. There's a lot of bitch in every woman - a lot in every man.

I need sex for a clear complexion, but I'd rather do it for love.

I never go out unless I look like Joan Crawford the movie star. If you want to see the girl next door, go next door.

If you have an ounce of common sense and one good friend you don't need an analyst.

You have to be self-reliant and strong to survive in this town. Otherwise you will be destroyed.

Greta Garbo

Greta Garbo quotes:

I never said, 'I want to be alone.' I only said, 'I want to be left alone.' There is all the difference.

If only those who dream about Hollywood knew how difficult it all is.

The story of my life is about back entrances, side doors, secret elevators and other ways of getting in and out of places so that people won't bother me.

Your joys and sorrows. You can never tell them. You cheapen the inside of yourself if you do tell them.

I don't want to be a silly temptress. I cannot see any sense in getting dressed up and doing nothing but tempting men in pictures.

I wish I were supernaturally strong so I could put right everything that is wrong.

Is there anything better than to be longing for something, when you know it is within reach?

Life would be so wonderful if we only knew what to do with it.

Frida Kahlo

Frida Kahlo quotes:

“I never paint dreams or nightmares. I paint my own reality.”

“I tried to drown my sorrows, but the bastards learned how to swim, and now I am overwhelmed by this decent and good feeling.”

“I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best.”

"The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.”

“My painting carries with it the message of pain.”

“There have been two great accidents in my life. One was the trolley, and the other was Diego. Diego was by far the worst.”

“Painting completed my life.”

“I hope the departure is joyful and I hope never to return.”

Edward Weston

Edward Weston quotes:

Anything that excites me for any reason, I will photograph; not searching for unusual subject matter, but making the commonplace unusual.

Consulting the rules of composition before taking a photograph, is like consulting the laws of gravity before going for a walk.

My own eyes are no more than scouts on a preliminary search, for the camera's eye may entirely change my idea.

Photography suits the temper of this age - of active bodies and minds. It is a perfect medium for one whose mind is teeming with ideas, imagery, for a prolific worker who would be slowed down by painting or sculpting, for one who sees quickly and acts decisively, accurately. Photography to the amateur is recreation, to the professional it is work, and hard work too, no matter how pleasurable it my be.

I see no reason for recording the obvious.

Conchita Montenegro, 1931

Anais Nin

Anais Nin quotes:

"And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage."

"Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age. "

"Do not seek the because. In love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions."

"Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living."

"Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should preserve it."

"Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death."

"Living never wore one out so much as the effort not to live."

"Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish it's source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings."

"Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terror, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them."

"The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say."

"Each friend represents a world in us, a world not possibly born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born."

"There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by imagination, as I try to do."

"We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are."

"The only abnormality is the incapacity to love."

"The dream was always running ahead of me. To catch up, to live for a moment in unison with it, that was the miracle."