29 Quotes by Louise Brooks

Most beautiful but dumb girls think they are smart and get away with it, because other people, on the whole, aren't much smarter.

After a person dies, his biographers feel free to give him a glittering list of intimate friends. Anecdotes are so much tastier spiced with expensive names.

I learned to act by watching Martha Graham dance, and I learned to dance by watching Charlie Chaplin act.

If I ever bore you, it'll be with a knife.

The tragedy of film history is that it is fabricated, falsified, by the very people who make film history.

For two extraordinary years I have been working on it - learning to write - but mostly learning how to tell the truth. At first it is quite impossible. You make yourself better than anybody, then worse than anybody, and when you finally come to see you are "like" everybody - that is the bitterest blow of all to the ego. But in the end it is only the truth, no matter how ugly or shameful, that is right, that fits together, that makes real people, and strangely enough - beauty...

I do not excuse myself with the usual escape of 'not trying.' I tried with all my heart.

I never gave away anything without wishing I had kept it; nor kept anything without wishing I had given it away.

Love is a publicity stunt, and making love, after the first curious raptures, is only another petulant way to pass the time waiting for the studio to call.