I would rather be a fairly happy wife and mother.

I am a genius. Then it amused me to keep saying so, but now it does not. I expected to be happy sometime. Now I know I shall never be.

When I wrote my book I wanted to love someone. I wanted to be in love. Now I know that I shall never be in love - and I no longer wish to be.

The world is like a little marsh filled with mint and white hawthorn.

Just why I sent it to the publishers would be hard to say, but when I had finished it I felt that it was literature, because it is real and because it was well written. And I know that the world wants such things.

I want to live quietly.

I would rather be a fairly happy wife and mother.

There is really no right and wrong. I recognize no right and wrong.

My intention to lecture is as vague as my intention is to go on the stage. I will never consider an offer to lecture, not because I despise the vocation, but because I have no desire to appear on the public rostrum.

The only joy I had was writing what was. That book was. It no longer amuses me to be all the things I was when I wrote that. But it is my story as I was then.

When I was three years old I was taken with my family to a little town in Western Minnesota, where I lived a more or less vapid and ordinary life until I was ten.

Let me but make a beginning, let me but strike the world in a vulnerable spot, and I can take it by storm.

I want to write such things as compel the admiring acclamation of the world at large, such things as are written but once in years, things subtle but distinctly different from the books written every day.

I was born to be alone, and I always shall be; but now I want to be.

I never give my real self. I have a hundred sides, and I turn first one way and then the other. I am playing a deep game. I have a number of strong cards up my sleeve. I have never been myself, excepting to two friends.

The book, you understand, was not written for publication. It was the portrayal of my emotions, the analysis of my own soul life during three months of my nineteenth year. I wrote then all the time, just as I do now, but, though the book is in diary form, it is not a diary.

Well, if I am not vulgar, neither is my book. I wrote myself. Suggestiveness is always vulgar. But truth never. My book is not even remotely suggestive. I call things by their names. That is all.

I read of the Kalamazoo girl who killed herself after reading the book. I am not at all surprised. She lived in Kalamazoo, for one thing, and then she read the book.

I have never read a line of Walt Whitman.

I do not see any beauty in self-restraint.

Genius of a kind has always been with me; an empty heart that has taken on a certain wooden quality; an excellent, strong woman's body and a pitiably starved soul.

You may think me crude, and probably I am crude, but I am not so crude as I was, for I am clever enough to see that the girl of nineteen who thought herself a genius was only an unusual girl writing her heart out.

Of poets I put Virgil first - he was greatest.

I've never made plans for more than a day ahead.

It is with pain that I read of the dire effects of my book upon the minds of young girls.

One must always say things that aim to interest, because in the world one must after all pay for one's keep.

I do not sing nor play, but I adore music, particularly Chopin. I like him because I cannot understand him.

I want fame more than I can tell. But more than I want fame I want happiness.

Fame is indeed beautiful and benign and gentle and satisfying, but happiness is something at once tender and brilliant beyond all things.

I love devils.

Fame is indeed beautiful and benign and gentle and satisfying but happiness is something at once tender and brilliant beyond all things.

Being a publicist is like management in a lot of ways - you're their friend, you're their mother, you're their confidante.

My mother keeps things in perspective for me. She makes me realize that the acting I do and love is no more important than what one of my brothers does-he works in a shoe repair shop. If my career ever tapers off, I'll go to college.

Bambi has a profound effect on children because it's about losing your mother.

For those whose wit becomes the mother of villainy, those it educates to be evil in all things.

I never turned down a mother role.

I'd like to one day play Amanda, the mother, in The Glass Menagerie.

My mother is Irish, my father is black and Venezuelan, and me - I'm tan, I guess.

I loved my mother, she's a good girl.

A man is free to go up as high as he can reach up to; but I, with all my style and pep, can't get a man my equal because a girl is always judged by her mother.

Just as a mother finds pleasure in taking her little child on her lap, there to feed and caress him, in like manner our loving God shows His fondness for His beloved souls who have given themselves entirely to Him and have placed all their hope in His goodness.

Well ironically my last three roles have all been a mother. One was a Canadian film where the baby was taken away because she is a drug addict, in Irish Jam I play a mother to a four year old. I think in the future I'll be able to handle the role with a lot more depth.

Most turkeys taste better the day after, my mother's tasted better the day before.

During my grief, I realised there was nothing I could do for my mother, but I did have a child.

That's so different in Hong Kong when I'm using my own mother language, I can treat the line in one thousand different ways, with many different reactions.

I am scared of becoming a mother.

My mother liked Jim Reeves. I hated his records. He was unbearable.

The eyebrow pencil and false eyelashes were essential; my mother didn't feel dressed without them.

When I was 13 I asked my mother if it was possible for this to end - I'd had enough of it. And that was right about the time that we got a call for "The Exorcist" interview.