Quotes

The best way to keep young is to keep going in whatever it is that keeps you going. With me that's work, and a lot of it. And when a job is finished, relax and have fun.

I've gone from saint to whore and back to saint again, all in one lifetime.

[to daughter Isabella Rossellini, on acting] Keep it simple. Make a blank face and the music and the story will fill it in.

People didn't expect me to have emotions like other women.

I've never sought success in order to get fame and money; it's the talent and the passion that count in success.

I remember one day sitting at the pool and suddenly the tears were streaming down my cheeks. Why was I so unhappy? I had success. I had security. But it wasn't enough. I was exploding inside.

I have no regrets. I wouldn't have lived my life the way I did if I was going to worry about what people were going to say.

Until 45 I can play a woman in love. After 55 I can play grandmothers. But between those ten years, it is difficult for an actress.

I don't regret a thing I've done. I only regret the things I didn't do.

Happiness is good health and a bad memory.

I don't worry about it because we are all growing old. If I were the only one I would worry. But we're all in the same boat, and all of my friends are coming with me. We all go toward old age. How many years left we don't know. We just have to accept it.

Time is shortening. But every day that I challenge this cancer and survive is a victory for me.

I was the shyest human ever invented, but I had a lion inside me that wouldn't shut up.

In Paris, when the picture came out [Casablanca (1942)], they weren't too pleased with it. They didn't like the political point of view. The picture was taken off immediately and was never sold to television. A while ago, it was brought in and opened in five theatres in Paris, as a new movie. They had a big gala opening where I appeared and people were absolutely crazy about it.

You must train your intuition - you must trust the small voice inside you which tells you exactly what to say, what to decide.

Be yourself. The world worships the original.

A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous.

It is not whether you really cry. It's whether the audience thinks you are crying.

There are advantages to being a star, though - you can always get a table in a full restaurant.

I always felt guilty. My whole life.

I don't think anyone has the right to intrude in your life, but they do. I would like people to separate the actress and the woman.

I can do everything with ease on the stage, whereas in real life I feel too big and clumsy. So I didn't choose acting; acting chose me.

I have grown up alone. I've taken care of myself. I worked, earned money and was independent at 18.

I have had my different husbands, my families. I am fond of them all and I visit them all. But deep inside me there is the feeling that I belong to show business."

I made so many films which were more important, but the only one people ever want to talk about is that one with [Humphrey Bogart].

Having a home, husband, and child ought to be enough for any woman's life. I mean, that's what we are meant for, isn't it? But still I think every day is a lost day. As if only half of me is alive. The other half is pressed down in a bag and suffocated.

If you took acting away from me, I'd stop breathing.

Acting is the best medicine in the world - if you're not feeling well, it goes away because you are busy thinking about something that isn't yourself. We actors are very fortunate people.

Cancer victims who don't accept their fate, who don't learn to live with it, will only destroy what little time they have left.

[Cary Grant] is quite remarkable, you know. I think [Audrey Hepburn] is now too old for him, and in his next picture he will be making love to someone like Jane Fonda.

No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight of the soul.

I always wanted to do comedies but nobody discovered this until my old age. They think all Swedes are like [Greta Garbo].

I am happy I was born Swedish because this means having a tough education -- at least it was in my time. But I couldn't live there, even when I was in my 20s. Sweden is too far from the rest of the world psychologically. There you feel confined on an island.

I work so hard before the camera and on the stage that I have neither the desire nor the energy to act in my private life

Hollywood was a terribly lonely place for me. I had wonderful associations with Humphrey Bogart, Gregory Peck, and all the others while I worked with them, but after they left the studios at night, they retired to their own circle of friends.

Because I'm a Swede I always suffer in films, drive audiences out into the night sobbing. Look at The Bells of St. Mary's (1945). I was happy and gay but there had to be something wrong. So they gave me TB.

[filming Anastasia (1956)] Yul Brynner was shorter, I suggested putting a little block under him. 'You think I want to play it standing on a box? I'll show the world what a big horse you are!' I never had a complex about my height after that.

[on Casablanca (1942)] I never knew how the picture was going to end, if I was really in love with my husband or Bogart. So I had no idea how I should play the character. I kept begging them to give me the ending but they'd say, 'We haven't made up our minds. We'll shoot it both ways'. We did the first ending and they said,'That's good, we won't bother with the other'.

[on Jean Renoir]: A force for life in everything he touches. A god and a poet!

[on the uproar over her unconcealed affair with director Roberto Rossellini] No one, not the politicians in the US Senate, the press nor the priesthood--no one but I can decide how I should live.

I suppose some of me was in Ilsa, because an actress does draw upon her feelings and her experiences when she brings to life a character like Ilsa. Ilsa never grows old, nor fat.

I feel sometimes people are disappointed when they meet me because they are expecting Ilsa from Casablanca, and instead they get Ingrid from Stockholm.

Corn on the cob. When I first saw people in America eating it, they looked like they were playing harmonicas. It was so funny-looking, it made me laugh. Then I tried it and I learned right away how to do it. It tasted so much better that way, but it tasted best eaten in private with a bib or a towel, so I didn't ruin my clothes.

Films are dying every minute, especially my poor Roberto's work. I'm not worried about my big Hollywood movies. And even my Swedish films are, I understand, safe in Sweden, but the films of Roberto ... Rome: Open City and Paisan are in the archives, but maybe some of the prints aren't so very good. The other films, the ones we made together, and all of the others of his, they have been brutally cut by other people. Roberto wasn't powerful enough to get the final cut.

I always wanted to be an actress but my father, who sang well himself, wanted me to be a singer. So to please him I studied singing for three years, but got nowhere. All the time, however, I was acting for my own pleasure. I ransacked the attic for old clothes which I put on while I recited.

"I work so hard before the camera and on the stage that I have neither the desire nor the energy to act in my private life. There I prefer to be myself and forget all about audiences and look after my family.''

When I was with him, I didn't feel shy or awkward or lonely-perhaps for the first time in my life. Most of all, he was alive and he made me feel alive.

We were introduced and Petter said something to me, and I didn't hear him. I was looking at those dark eyes of Roberto's. He was very shy, and he didn't look like a movie man, not the sort I was used to anyway.

I come from Sweden and we Swedes are very different from Americans. By nature we are a more serious-minded people. Perhaps it is the ruggedness of the country and the rigors of our climate that make us so. We are not frivolous. The lighter side of life is less important. We even take our pleasures gravely.

"There was no thought of my mind that I would ever divorce Roberto. I'd have gone through hell and still stayed with him, having had such hell to marry him in the first place. Besides I could not leave him because I would have felt I had abandoned somebody that I had been part of ruining. After all, who took the first step? I did.