My best qualities are endurance, guts and a sense of humor. My worst? Oversensitivity and impatience.”
“If you keep marrying as I do, you soon learn everyone’s hobbies.”
“There is nothing in the world so satisfying as acting in something you love.”
“You can almost reach out and touch those rows of people, and the response from them is a kind of energy that warms you…It’s like the sun.” (Speaking about her Broadway experience acting in “Tea and Sympathy”)
“The Oscar can be a jinx, bringing with it envy, hatred, and ill wishes–uneasy is the winner.”
“The Oscar was a marvelous concept of some very responsible people. It was supposed to be an event to make our business more dignified. But it quickly became just another monetary spectacle.”
“A lot of people work from the outside in; I work from the inside out. I don’t use false noses and artificial gestures. Once you become the person you’re playing, these things happen automatically.”
“Looking back on Hollywood, I realize that one outstanding quality it possesses is…fear. Fear stalks the sound stages, the publicity departments, the executive offices. Since careers often begin by chance, by the hunch of a producer or casting director, a casual meeting with an agent or publicist, they can evaporate just as quixotically.”
“I feel that the camera is so pure and so marvelous it’s really like playing to God, because that camera is the truth. You don’t have to justify yourself or explain anthing–it sees all, knows all. So the camera has been my closest friend.”
“I am a rapid, high-metabolism person, and New York is my speed.”
When asked what one thing is most harmful, Joan’s reply was:
“Injustice. In the legal or the personal sense. It’s always destructive, particularly when the injured person hasn’t a chance to defend himself or herself.”
“Cooking is an art all women should know. My daughters, Debbie and Martita, have taken to it with great gusto.”
“Give me books, good music, a garden to work and I’m content. Give me a kitchen, pots, pans and solitude and I’m in heaven. At heart, I’m a homebody, a country girl–and proud of it. As a child I developed an interest in cooking, partly because I was given a toy stove on my ninth birthday, but mostly because poor health kept me indoors and out of the whooping activities my friends were enjoying.”
“If movies taught me anything, it was discipline.”
“I always wanted to mingle with older people. I wanted to learn from them. You see, I don’t believe that when you lose your youth, you lose everything.”
“It seems there’s just no room left for elegance in this paper-plate, blue-jean world. And I, for one, think it’s a shame.”