Marilyn Monroe Quotes (1926-1962)

“Hollywood is a place where they'll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your soul. I know, because I turned down the first offer often enough and held out for the fifty cents.”

“She came up to me and said, "You're going to play my uncle, right?" "That's right, Miss Monroe." Then she looked at me and said, "No incest."”

“I think Marilyn is bound to make an almost overwhelming impression on the people who meet her for the first time. It is not that she is pretty, although she is of course almost incredibly pretty, but she radiates, at the same time, unbounded vitality and a kind of unbelievable innocence. I have met the same in a lion-cub, which my native servants in Africa brought me. I would not keep her, since I felt that it would in some way be wrong...I shall never forget the almost overpowering feeling of unconquerable strength and sweetness which she conveyed. I had all the wild nature of Africa amicably gazing at me with mighty playfulness.”

“Marilyn Monroe’s suicide made headlines when I was twenty-two years old and struggling to find my place in the world. We were both working class in background, but there any comparison ended. While I was a doctor’s assistant by day and a pariah dyke wearing boys’ clothes by night, Marilyn was the most heterosexual, “most beautiful” and most desired in the public world. She was a star, she kept company with America’s biggest male stars—Mickey Mantle of baseball, Arthur Miller of literature, John F. Kennedy of politics. And at what seemed the height of a gloriously successful career, she killed herself. Or that was the story. then. Since, it has changed, from a conspiracy that she was murdered, to the more plausible reason: the accidental overdose of an addict. I was upset by her death; if she could not succeed in life, how on earth could I? And yet, her image did not fade; she continues to hold a position as an icon of sexual power.”

“Hawks says it's wonderful we knew and worked with Marilyn before she got difficult. Because she was so winning and adorable in Monkey Business [1952]. When I drink that youth serum and I'm acting like a teenager, Marilyn really got into it. I'm diving off the high board and she's giggling and waving me on. Years later she asked me to costar in something called The Billionaire. It was a comedy and she said her husband Arthur Miller was reworking it. Arthur Miller a comedy writer? I ran away and so did Greg Peck, and the completed film, Let's Make Love [1960], showed she'd become all blurry and distant. It was sad.”

“We think of Marilyn who was every man's love affair with America. Marilyn Monroe who was blonde and beautiful and had a sweet little rinky-dink of a voice and all the cleanliness of all the clean American backyards.”

“There are people so vivid in life that they seem not to disappear when they die, and for many weeks I found myself having to come about and force myself to encounter the fact that Marilyn had ended. I realized that I still, even then, expected to meet her once more, somewhere, sometime, and maybe talk sensibly about all the foolishness we had been through — in which case I would probably have fallen in love with her again. And the iron logic of her death did not help much: I could still see her coming across the lawn, or touching something, or laughing, at the same time that I confronted the end of her as one might stand watching the sinking sun. When a reporter called asking if I would be attending her funeral in California, the very idea of a burial was outlandish, and stunned as I was, I answered without thinking, "She won't be there." I could hear his astonishment, but I could only hang up, it was beyond explaining.”

“The women she played were totally unreal. Her vulnerability in her flesh was as compelling and audible as a baby crying, but she played either a gold digger-the woman who can only be bought or the child/whore who asks nothing whatsoever, who is available like a tray of hors d'oeuvres at a cocktail party. In The Seven Year Itch she is the total male fantasy of available snatch, a gorgeous woman without any entanglements, no friends, no family, no demands, who wants only a married man since he won't fall in love with her. What living woman could ever identify with that character?...Her career began with the famous nude calendar, although the most lasting images are at once dressed and undressed-the pose on the subway grating, for instance. She wears a flimsy looking halter dress that flies up, deserting her. She is the embodiment of titillation. Any man can dream of possessing her, because she seems so accessible and defenseless. For a man, that image on which can be projected any fantasy, any wish fulfillment, is the source of her immense and lasting appeal. She is a living doll-the perfect body that offers everything and asks nothing. She embodies the woman who never was because she isn't anything in herself. That image was something she put on to go out into the frightening and hostile world. She had learned early that she would be rewarded if she appeared compliant and childlike, not in the sense of the virgin to be deflowered, but in the sense of the woman who doesn't understand, doesn't know what to do, never learns a lesson; the warm and sensual Galatea who never gets up and leaves Pygmalion, but waits passively for the next owner. But behind that façade was a woman needy, scared, ambitious, leaking self-hatred and desperately wanting something real and solid and important. She wanted to be...respected. She never was.”

“When Marilyn Monroe got out of the game, I wrote something like, "Southern California's special horror notwithstanding, if the world offered nothing, nowhere to support or make bearable whatever her private grief was, then it is that world, and not she, that is at fault." I wrote that in the first few shook-up minutes after hearing the bulletin sandwiched in between Don and Phil Everly and surrounded by all manner of whoops and whistles coming out of an audio signal generator, like you are apt to hear on the provincial radio these days. But I don't think I'd take those words back.”

“I remember her on the screen, huge as a colossus doll, mincing and whispering and simply hoping her way into total vulnerability.”

“You want me to talk about Marilyn? My God, I think there have been more books on Marilyn Monroe than on World War II, and there's a great similarity. It was a very complex thing working with her because she had tremendous problems with herself. She was on the edge of deep depression – whatever you want to call it – at all times. There was always a question, which you sweated out: "Is she going to show up? Is she going to show up on time? Is she going to live through the scene? Is she going to finish the picture?" And that is a very nerve-wracking thing if you've got eight million dollars in the enterprise. But when it's all done, it's well worth it. It's that old thing that I said, I don't know, four hundred years ago: "Look, if we wanted somebody to be on time and to know the lines just perfectly, I've got an old aunt in Vienna. She's going to be there at five in the morning and never miss a word. But who wants to look at her?"”