28 Quotes by Montgomery Clift

Failure and its accompanying misery is for the artist his most vital source of creative energy.

The closer we come to the negative, to death, the more we blossom.

Look, I'm not odd. I'm just trying to be an actor; not a movie star, an actor.

The only line that's wrong in Shakespeare is 'holding a mirror up to nature.' You hold a magnifying glass up to nature. As an actor you just enlarge it enough so that your audience can identify with the situation. If it were a mirror, we would have no art.

I have enough money to get by. I'm not independently wealthy, just independently lazy, I suppose.

Look! Look! If you look really hard at things you'll forget you're going to die.

James Dean’s death had a profound effect on me. The instant I heard about it, I vomited. I don’t know why,

The sadness of our existence should not leave us blunted, on the contrary--how to remain thin-skinned, vulnerable and stay alive?

The thing that bugs me is the average woman's complete ignorance of the functional purpose of cosmetics, which is to supplement, not conceal.