Quotes from Bette Davis

I don't think of myself as a character actress - that's become a phrase which means you've had it.

Hollywood always wanted me to be pretty, but I fought for realism.

I don't think in business it matters whether you're a man or a woman if you can do your job and have a brain.

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

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

Pray to God and say the lines.

I would take a bad script and a good director any day against a good script and a bad director.

Home is where you go to when you've nowhere to go.

I will not retire while I've still got my legs and my make-up box.

Yes, burn your bridges.

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.

Almost as many inhumanities are committed in the name of love as in the name of religion.

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

I have often seen an actor laugh off the stage, but I don't remember ever having seen one weep.

People often become actresses because of something they dislike about themselves: They pretend they are someone else.

Life is the past, the present and the perhaps.

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

Good actors I've worked with all started out making faces in a mirror, and you keep making faces all your life.

Acting should be bigger than life. Scripts should be bigger than life. It should all be bigger than life.

I never did pal around with actresses. Their talk usually bored me to tears.

Being called very, very difficult is the beginning of success. Until you're called very, very difficult you're really nobody at all.

Success is built on disappointment, and disappointment is inherent in all success.

I guess I'm larger than life. That's my problem.

Gay Liberation? I ain't against it, it's just that there's nothing in it for me.