Top 50 Gloria Swanson Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Never say never Never is a long, undependable time, and life is too full of rich possibilities to have restrictions placed upon it.”

— Gloria Swanson

2. “Key West for me was a tropical island paradise.”

— Gloria Swanson

3. “Your body is the direct result of what you eat as well as what you don’t eat.”

— Gloria Swanson

4. “I feel sure that unborn babies pick their parents.”

— Gloria Swanson

5. “I think all this talk about age is foolish. Every time I’m one year older, everyone else is too.”

— Gloria Swanson

6. “I have gone through a long apprenticeship. I have gone through enough of being a nobody. I have decided that when I am a star, I will be every inch and every moment the star! Everybody from the studio gateman to the highest executive will know it.”

— Gloria Swanson

7. “As Daddy said, life is 95 percent anticipation.”

— Gloria Swanson

8. “Much as I cared for Joseph Kennedy, he was a classic example of that person in the arts with lots of brains and drive but little taste or talent.”

— Gloria Swanson

9. “When I die, my epitaph should read: She Paid the Bills. That’s the story of my private life.”

— Gloria Swanson

10. “Never say never, for if you live long enough, chances are you will not be able to abide by the simplest of such injunctions.”

— Gloria Swanson

11. “If you’re 40 years old and you’ve never had a failure, you’ve been deprived.”

— Gloria Swanson

12. “Life and death. They are somehow sweetly and beautifully mixed, but I don’t know how.”

— Gloria Swanson

13. “I am a very pragmatic person.”

— Gloria Swanson

14. “Writing the story of your own life is a bit like drilling your own teeth.”

— Gloria Swanson

15. “I became a fanatic about healthy food in 1944.”

— Gloria Swanson

16. “My mother and I could always look out the same window without ever seeing the same thing.”

— Gloria Swanson

17. “Hollywood’s old trick: repeat a successful formula until it dies.”

— Gloria Swanson

18. “I entered the cosmetics industry because I wanted more women to use cosmetics made with safe, healthful ingredients.”

— Gloria Swanson

19. “The day I initiated divorce proceedings against Michael Farmer, I was ready to retire to a desert cave and rethink my life.”

— Gloria Swanson

20. “Nobody gets anything for nothing.”

— Gloria Swanson

21. “The Paramount executives were so pleased with Sunset Boulevard that they asked me to do a publicity tour.”

— Gloria Swanson

22. “There was no place at all for me in my father’s military world.”

— Gloria Swanson

23. “My greatest debt will always be to the movie-going public of yesterday and today, without whose love and devotion I would have had no story to tell.”

— Gloria Swanson

24. “One of the networks sent me a TV set to watch. I didn’t care for the medium. It depressed me.”

— Gloria Swanson

25. “Because I take care of my body, it doesn’t look like the body of a woman of my years.”

— Gloria Swanson

26. “The only time I ever went hunting I remembered it as a grisly experience.”

— Gloria Swanson

27. “The first feminine feature that goes, with advancing age, is the neck.”

— Gloria Swanson

28. “The fuss that actors began making about the difficulty of shifting to sound struck me as perfectly foolish.”

— Gloria Swanson

29. “The English press treated the world premiere of my first talking picture as a major event.”

— Gloria Swanson

30. “I’ve given my memoirs far more thought than any of my marriages. You can’t divorce a book.”

— Gloria Swanson

31. “I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life playing Norma Desmond over and over again.”

— Gloria Swanson

32. “In a theater you can fool everyone past the tenth row if you’re good, but on the screen you can’t really fool anyone for a second.”

— Gloria Swanson

33. “Fame was thrilling only until it became grueling. Money was fun only until you ran out of things to buy.”

— Gloria Swanson

34. “After 16 years in pictures I could not be intimidated easily, because I knew where all the skeletons were buried.”

— Gloria Swanson

35. “Sunset Boulevard opened in August 1950, and it was pronounced the best movie ever made about Hollywood.”

— Gloria Swanson

36. “All they had to do was put my name on a marquee and watch the money roll in.”

— Gloria Swanson

37. “Tennessee Williams was a gifted talker with a beautiful accent and we had lots of things in common.”

— Gloria Swanson

38. “It’s amazing to find that so many people, who I thought really knew me, could have thought that ‘Sunset Boulevard’ was autobiographical. I’ve got nobody floating in my swimming pool.”

— Gloria Swanson

39. “I consider anybody who weighs over 200 pounds fat, and time was when I could not refrain from telling such people so.”

— Gloria Swanson

40. “My sculpture is very personal; for years my subjects were family and close, close friends.”

— Gloria Swanson

41. “I doubted that there were Communists hiding behind every corporation desk and director’s chair.”

— Gloria Swanson

42. “From the first moment on the set I was consumed with curiousity about the technical side of shooting a sound picture.”

— Gloria Swanson

43. “I always anticipated difficulties in order to avoid scenes.”

— Gloria Swanson

44. “The major gossip columnists were more concerned with protecting the industry than with gunning down sinners.”

— Gloria Swanson

45. “At 26 I felt myself a victim rather than a victor in the realm of pictures.”

— Gloria Swanson

46. “By the time I was 15, my mother had turned me into a real clotheshorse.”

— Gloria Swanson

47. “All creative people should be required to leave California for three months every year.”

— Gloria Swanson

48. “I was 25 and the most popular celebrity in the world, with the possible exception of my friend Mary Pickford.”

— Gloria Swanson

49. “In two months Joseph Kennedy had taken over my entire life, and I trusted him implicitly to make the most of it.”

— Gloria Swanson

50. “Sam Wood, the director, made most of his money as a real estate agent; there was nothing of the temperamental artist about him.”

— Gloria Swanson