“I will never be below the title.”
“If you want a thing well done, get a couple of old broads to do it.”
“Today everyone is a star – they’re all billed as ‘starring’ or ‘also starring’. In my day, we earned that recognition.”
(About Katharine Hepburn’s tie with Barbra Streisand for the 1968 Oscar) “I wanted to be the first to win three Oscars, but Miss Hepburn has done it. Actually it hasn’t been done. Miss Hepburn only won half an Oscar. If they’d given me half an Oscar I would have thrown it back in their faces. You see, I’m an Aries. I never lose.”
(About fourth husband, Gary Merrill) “Gary was a macho man, but none of my husbands was ever man enough to become Mr. Bette Davis.”
(When she was told that “at one time” she had a reputation for being difficult) “At one time?! I’ve been known as difficult for 50 years, practically! What do you mean ‘at one time?’ Nooo, I’ve been like this for 50 years. And it’s always always to make it the best film I can make it!”
(When told not to speak ill of the dead) “Just because someone is dead does not mean they have changed!”
(About her mother) “I had to be the monster for both of us.”
“If Hollywood didn’t work out, I was prepared to be the best secretary in the world.”
“I have been uncompromising, peppery, infractable, monomaniacal, tactless, volatile and offtimes disagreeable. I suppose I’m larger than life.”
“(Joan Crawford) and I have never been warm friends. We are not simpatico. I admire her, and yet I feel uncomfortable with her. To me, she is the personification of the Movie Star. I have always felt her greatest performance is Crawford being Crawford.”
(After blowing a line several times in Hollywood Canteen (1944), in which she plays herself) “I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I think I just can’t play myself. I don’t know how! But, if you give me a drink – give me a cigarette – give me a gun – I’ll play any old bag you want me to. I just can’t play myself!”
“I was a person who couldn’t make divorce work. For me, there’s nothing lonelier than a turned-down toilet seat.”
“I always had the will to win. I felt it baking cookies. They had to be the best cookies anyone baked.”
“My favorite person to work with was Claude Rains.”
“I certainly would have given anything to have worked with John Wayne. He’s the most attractive man who ever walked the earth, I think.”
(During tension on the set of The Whales of August, about co-star Lilian Gish) “She ought to know about close-ups… she was around when they invented them!”