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"Actors," Jonny Barrymore one told me, "are people, but not human."

I was intrigued by criminology, psychology and psychiatry, and there was material there for my plays.

With this kind of income I was even paying for my own jewels - sometimes. I have always felt a gift diamond shines better than one you buy for yourself.

We should know everything about ourselves, but it is wiser (for sex's sake) not to know everything about each other.

I have come up with no great solution to the human dilemma, but I have made a peace, or perhaps only an armed truce, with myself and the universe.

Usually a man is more fascinating at forty than before. Often he has more polish, poise, charm, and more money. The last is stronger than love potion for a happy love affair. Money is of value for what it buys, and in love it buys time, place, intimacy, comfort, and a private corner alone.

From now on I knew that I could trust myself only to material that would be "great" for my personality, though not necessarily great in literary sense. Whatever I did next would have to top my previous success.

The Judo is, I suppose, the most valuable training I retain from my movie lessons. I don't need it for protection; it's fine exercise.

My life has been for me a splendid prelude do what I still hope to do.

I became a writer by the accident of needing material and having no place to get it. At least not the kind of writing I wanted for my stage appearances.

Jim persisted in behaving like my stern guardian; a very strict guardian who has in his charge a wayward and minor girl child that has to be protected from her own urges against the inclinations of wicked men.

I was pleased, but amazed. I always enjoyed my success, but this was overwhelming. Like most, I had accepted motion pictures. More people had seen me than saw Napoleon, Lincoln and Cleopatra. I was better known than Einstein, Shaw or Picasso. And yet I had merely done in front of a camera what I had done for years, as well, on stage. I accepted the success, but keep my same hat size.

nothing is as easy to forgive on stage as success.

Evil on certain levels I can understand, but degrees of wickedness puzzle me.

war had been a background to my young life in the theatre, a more bloody drama than any play, where the dead did not get up when the curtain came down.

every woman can have her own kind of beauty, if she's willing to look for it and try for it. Men like so many things.

I wrote the way I performed: boldly and loudly, I suppose, with an applauding dash and ironic overtones. But always with an awareness of my worth.

Like I always say, it's not the men you see me with, it's the men you don't see me with.

The producer started acting like a stallion in stud. I said, "I thought you were a business man?"
"Mae, why do you think I spent all this money and time on you?"
"To make more money. What else?"
"I fell in love with you."

some popular songs banned as not being in the proper fighting spirit: "I don't Want to Get Well, I'm in Love with a Beautiful Nurse." And any song with "Peace" in its title was called German propaganda.

just because a lady is a little vulgar it is no sign that her heart isn't 22-carat gold.

It is not wisdom to be only wise
But it is wisdom to believe the heart...

When I was ready to take the show to Broadway, some New York officials came to Jim Timony and asked us not to bring the show into New York because it would "upset the city."

I had touched mystery, but had not solved it.

The show was stolen entirely for weeks by an act five thousand years old when they opened the tomb of King Tut in Egypt. Joe Frisco said to me, "That's how biz. A comeback."

A woman should appreciate and respect a man's love for her, even when she finds she cannot return that love.

Balzac said most men handle a beautiful woman the way a zoo ape handles a rare cello.

There's a man for every mood

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