Best 24 quotes of Elaine Dundy on MyQuotes

Acting doesn't bring anything to a text. On the contrary, it detracts from it.

At some point in my life I realized I knew only celebrities, I didn't know any real people. I think it was a master stroke of Fate that in researching the greatest celebrity of them all, I would at last be meeting real people, finding them more extraordinary than celebrities; fascinated by them all and enjoying enduring friendships with some.

I always expect people to behave much better than I do. When they actually behave worse, I am frankly incredulous.

I mean, the question actors most often get asked is how they can bear saying the same things over and over again, night after night, but God knows the answer to that is, don't we all anyway; might as well get paid for it.

It's difficult to explain, but I just somehow feel that I never really *have* lived; that I never really will live--exist or whatever--in the sense that other people do. It drives me crazy. I was terribly aware of it all those nights waiting for you in the Ritz bar looking around at what seemed to be real grown-up lives. I just find everybody else's life surrounded by plate glass. I mean I'd like to break through it just once and actually touch one.

Oh, Teddy, darling, thank you, thank you, for restoring my cynicism. I was too young to lose it.

That's my answer to the question what is your strongest emotion, if you ever want to ask me: Curiosity, old bean. Curiosity every time.

The vehemence of my moral indignation surprised me. Was I beginning to have standards and principles, and, oh dear, scruples? What were they, and what would I do with them, and how much were they going to get in my way?

To me Vivien Leigh was a tragic heroine of classic proportions: chosen, blessed and abandoned by the gods. Obstinately she tried to control and defy her destiny and to know her story is to be inspired by pity and terror.

What is always overlooked is that although the poor want to be rich, it does not follow that they either like the rich or that they in any way want to emulate their characters which, in fact, they despise. Both the poor and the rich have always found precisely the same grounds on which to complain about each other. Each feels the other has no manners, is disloyal, corrupt, insensitive - and has never put in an honest day's work in its life.

What’s the use of remembering anything? If it was unpleasant it was unpleasant and if it was pleasant it’s over.

As a matter of fact I'd had my hair dyed a marvelous shade of pale red so popular with Parisian tarts that season.

For someone who likes to get around as much as I do, I really travel quite badly. Planes frighten me, boats bore me, trains make me dirty, cars make me car-sick. And practically nothing can equal the critical dismay with which I first greet the sight of new places.

For some people history is a Beach or a Tower or a Graveyard. For me it was a giant primordial Toyshop with all its windows gloriously ablaze…It was my present for being alive.

I felt experienced without feeling that I, personally, had been through anything.

I had no technique for dealing with him: only an overpowering, unnerving, irrational, chemical desire to be with him.

Now.' He said, 'I have to ask you three question. How old are you? Are you in love? And what in God’s name are you doing here?

…the fabric of his shirt was woven of some Martian stuff; even his very skin was of another weave.

The world is wide, wide, wide, and I am young, young, young, and we’re all going to live forever!' We were very hungry but we didn’t want to leave, so we ate there. We had chicken sandwiches; boy, the chicken of the century. Dry, wry, and tender, the dryness sort of rubbing against your tongue on soft, bouncy white bread with slivers of juicy wet pickles. Then we had some very salty potato chips and some olives stuffed with pimentos and some Indian nuts and some tiny pearl onions and some more popcorn. Then we washed the whole thing down with iced martinis and finished up with large cups of strong black coffee and cigarettes. One of my really great meals.

To accuse the American male of not bathing in Paris is merely to flatter him.

We had dry martinis; great wing-shaped glasses of perfumed fire, tangy as the early morning air.

We went to a movie and he kissed me for the first time. We kissed right through it... “Now let’s kiss somewhere else,” said Max.

[W]hat upset grownups of both sexes about Elvis' performance was that he had broken the deepest taboo of all. He used his body as rhythmically and erotically and seductively as a woman--that was the forbidden territory he had entered. It was not only repulsive and offensive--it was nauseating--the word most used. It was an attack on male dignity. The kids, however, not yet grown into the stereotypes of gender, saw in him an exhilarating physical freedom.

You're not playing the game," he said grimly. "English gossip isn't supposed to get back to the person it's about.