"The most outrageous actress on either side of the Mason-Dixon Line is indisputably Tallulah Bankhead. With a career that spanned fifty years, she appeared in fifty-one plays, eighteen movies, and made countless radio, television and nightclub appearances; but she is best known for "molding her life into a stunning theatrical role," as Notable American Women puts it. Named for Tallulah Falls in her native Alabama, her throaty rasp, golden-blond hair, ripping wit, and absolute scorn for convention conquered everybody she encountered in real life, on screen, and especially on stage where she triumphed brilliantly playing her naturally quick wit and sterling rapport with others. … Nobody, past or present, could beat the stunning beauty, with huge expressive eyes, to a punch line."

"Tallulah Bankhead is a wicked archangel with her flowing ash-blonde hair and carven features. Her profile is perfectly Grecian, flow of line from forehead to nose like the head on a medallion. ... She is a Medusa, very exotic, with a glorious skull, high pumice-stone cheek bones, and a broad brow, and was equally interesting sculpturally when she was plump as she now is cadaverously thin. Hers is the most easily recognizable face I know and the most luscious. ... Miss Bankhead's cheeks are like huge acid-pink peonies, her eyelashes are built out with hot liquid paint to look like burnt matches, and her sullen, discontented, rather evil rosebud of a mouth is painted the brightest scarlet and is as shiny as Tiptree's strawberry jam."

"A day away from Tallulah is like a month in the country."

"My father warned me about men and booze, but he never mentioned a word about women and cocaine."

"Codeine...bourbon..."

"Going down on a woman gives me a stiff neck, going down on a man gives me lockjaw, and conventional sex gives me claustrophobia."

"I'll come and make love to you at five o'clock. If I'm late, start without me."

"There's less in this than meets the eye."

"But everybody loves Tallulah! Who'd have the heart not to!"

"Here's a rule I recommend. Never practice two vices at once."

"If you really want to help the American theater, don't be an actress, dahling. Be an audience."

"The whole point about Tallulah was that she had no inhibitions. Now some people can take this, others can't."

"I read Shakespeare and the Bible, and I can shoot dice. That's what I call a liberal education."

"Nobody can be exactly like me. Sometimes even I have trouble doing it."

"Let's not quibble! I'm the foe of moderation, the champion of excess. If I may lift a line from a die-hard whose identity is lost in the shuffle, "I'd rather be strongly wrong than weakly right.""

"I'm as pure as the driven slush."

"No man worth his salt, no man of spirit and spine, no man for whom I could have any respect, could rejoice in the identification of Tallulah's husband. It's tough enough to be bogged down in a legend. It would be even tougher to marry one."

"It's one of the tragic ironies of the theatre that only one man in it can count on steady work — the night watchman."

"The only thing I regret about my past is the length of it. If I had to live my life again, I'd make the same mistakes, only sooner."

"I have three phobias which, could I mute them, would make my life as slick as a sonnet, but as dull as ditch water — I hate to go to bed, I hate to get up, and I hate to be alone."

"Cocaine isn't habit forming. I should know — I've been using it for years."

"I don’t know what I want. Nobody knows — or if they do, they don’t know for long. I mean, you don’t want the same thing long enough for it to be What You Want From Life in capital letters. Well, maybe some people do. Maybe there's a few simple folks — or maybe a few million, I don't know — who fix their hearts, and their minds, and their everlasting souls on a thing, and keep on all their lives hoping for it. Living for it. Wanting It From Life. But these are the people who never get it."

"The cynic says "blessed is he who expecteth nothing, for he shall not be disappointed." I say "blessed is he who expecteth everything, for he can't always be disappointed.""

"Only good girls keep diaries. Bad girls don't have the time."

"Tallulah never bored anyone, and I consider that humanitarianism of a very high order indeed."

"I was raped in a driveway when I was eleven. … It was a terrible experience because we had all that gravel."

"My first memory of the great lady — for that she was, above all — was a college boy invitation I sent her to attend the Yale-Princeton game. Never a thought entered my mind that the lady would answer the telegram, but she did, and altho it was in the negative, she had a devoted fan forever. Later, I not only came to know her, but worked with her in radio and on the screen — and fan I still was, to the end."

"She was magnificent. There ain't nobody like her. In her heyday nobody had a bigger ball. She had that magnificent beauty that is ugly in a funny way. Judith Anderson and Laurette Taylor had it too. They came off being the most beautiful women in the world through an illumination of their own personality. I've seen Tallulah look absolutely dreadful, then take a shot of ammonia and Coca-Cola and turn into a beauty."

"He was over at my house every day between fifth grade and eighth grade."

"I valued my independence from an early age and was always something of a individualist … Well, a show-off anyway."

"I can be President of the United States, or I can control Alice. I cannot possibly do both."

"If you can't say something good about someone, sit right here by me."

"The little man on the wedding cake."

"I have a simple philosophy. Fill what's empty. Empty what's full. And scratch where it itches."

"I've always believed in the adage that the secret of eternal youth is arrested development."

"He looks as though he's been weaned on a pickle."

"Her life speaks for itself … She lived a wonderful life, a magical life."

"It's not an old movie if you haven't seen it."

"People said Bacall was 'tough.' She's a pussycat with a heart of gold."

"That's absolutely one of my most favorite movies, for so many reasons. I fought for that part; I wanted it badly. I took a lower salary, I did everything. Grace Kelly said, "I'll never forgive you for playing that part. It was written for me". She [Kelly] got the prince [Rainier], I got the part."

"He was... a womanizer, he wanted to be in the sack with everybody."

"[I]t was her modelling career that took off before the acting one when she was introduced to the Harper's Bazaar columnist Diana Vreeland by none other than Baron Nicolas de Gunzburg — not just an editor at the magazine but also a former actor who had played the leading role in Carl Dreyer's classic Vampyr (1932)."

"A planned life is a dead life."

"I love Nicole. Nicole and I happen to be very great friends. Besides that, the press never get it straight. They do not print what you say... We were in Venice for Birth at the Venice Film Festival. And you know when you have a day when you go from one room to another with the roundtables with about five journalists sitting around at each table throwing questions at you all the time. So in one of these rooms, I'm sitting there. And one of the journalists said, you're an icon and Nicole Kidman's an icon and what do you think about that? And I said, why do you have to burden her with the category? She's a young woman. She's got her whole career ahead of her. Why does she have to be pegged as an icon or as anything? Let her enjoy her time. Don't, you know, suddenly put her in a slot. And that was all I said. The word "legend" never came up. It was "icon.""

"I went to a sneak preview... I was sort of stunned by it, because you don't realize what you've done. I never knew what was going to happen, but they knew. Warners knew, and Howard knew."

"[B]adly, playing the Missouri Waltz, or something."

"It could be that today's conservative movement remains in thrall to the same narrative that has defined its attitude toward film and the arts for decades. Inspired by feelings of exclusion after Hollywood and the popular culture turned leftward in the '60s and '70s, this narrative has defined the film industry as an irredeemably liberal institution toward which conservatives can only act in opposition—never engagement. Ironically, this narrative ignores the actual history of Hollywood, in which conservatives had a strong presence from the industry's founding in the early 20th century up through the '40s, '50s and into the mid-'60s]. The conservative Hollywood community at that time included such leading directors as Howard Hawks, Frank Capra, and Cecil B. DeMille, and major stars like John Wayne, Clark Gable, and Charlton Heston. These talents often worked side by side with notable Hollywood liberals like directors Billy Wilder, William Wyler, and John Huston, and stars like Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, and Spencer Tracy. The richness of classic Hollywood cinema is widely regarded as a testament to the ability of these two communities to work together, regardless of political differences."

"Imagination is the highest kite that can fly."

"The people I've known I must say are extraordinary. When I think about some of them, I can't believe that I knew them all. And I think the reason I knew most of them at the beginning was because they were of Bogie's generation, 25 years my senior, not mine. But they were the most talented people of all."

"Nicole and I worked together on Dogville and we were friends when we started this. That laid the groundwork for our fabulous relationship on screen and off."