Marilyn Monroe

Marilyn Monroe (born Norma Jeane Mortenson June 1, 1926 – August 5, 1962), was an American actress of the 20th century. Her sizzling screen presence and mysterious death at the age of 36 would make her a perennial sex symbol, and later a pop icon.

Quotations

• "My illusions didn't have anything to do with being a fine actress. I knew how third rate I was. I could actually feel my lack of talent, as if it were cheap clothes I was wearing inside. But, my God, how I wanted to learn, to change, to improve!"
• "I'm not interested in money. I just want to be wonderful."
• "Sometimes I think it would be easier to avoid old age, to die young, but then you'd never complete your life, would you? You'd never wholly know yourself."
• "A career is wonderful, but you can't curl up with it on a cold night."
• "I've been on a calendar, but never on time."
• "No one ever told me I was pretty when I was a little girl. All little girls should be told they're pretty, even if they aren't."
• "Please don't make me a joke. End the interview with what I believe. I don't mind making jokes, but I don't want to look like one. I want to be an artist, an actress with integrity."
• "In Hollywood a girl's virtue is much less important than her hairdo. You're judged by how you look, not by what you are. Hollywood's a place where they'll pay you a thousand dollars for kiss, and fifty cents for your soul. I know, because I turned down the first offer often enough and held out for the fifty."
• "People had a habit of looking at me as if I were some kind of mirror instead of a person. They didn't see me, they saw their own lewd thoughts, then they white-masked themselves by calling me the lewd one."
• "A sex-symbol becomes a thing, I just hate being a thing. But if I'm going to be a symbol of something I'd rather have it sex than some other things we've got symbols of."
• "The truth is I've never fooled anyone. I've let people fool themselves. They didn't bother to find out who and what I was. Instead they would invent a character for me. I wouldn't argue with them. They were obviously loving somebody I wasn't. When they found this out, they would blame me for disillusioning them and fooling them."
• "If I had observed all the rules, I'd never have gotten anywhere."
• "It stirs up envy, fame does. People you run into feel that, well, who does she think she is, Marilyn Monroe? They feel fame gives them some kind of privilege to walk up to you and say anything to you, of any kind of nature - and it won't hurt your feelings - like it's happening to your clothes not you."
• "Some people have been unkind. If I say I want to grow as an actress, they look at my figure. If I say I want to develop, to learn my craft, they laugh. Somehow they don't expect me to be serious about my work."
• "I've never dropped anyone I believed in."
• "I want to be an artist not an erotic freak. I don't want to be sold to the public as a celluloid aphrodisiac."
• "I used to think as I looked at the Hollywood night, 'There must be thousands of girls sitting alone like me, dreaming of becoming a movie star. But I'm not going to worry about them. I'm dreaming the hardest.'"
• "I knew I belonged to the public and to the world. Not because I was talented or even beautiful, but because I had never belonged to anything or anyone else."