Just try to love a man — and he kills you. Just feel that you cannot live without someone — and he kills you.
To say yes, commit herself to him, and then have to watch him recoil when he found out the extent of her inadequacy? Unbearable! He would learn what she was really like, and the knowledge would kill his love for her. Unbearable to say yes, and end in being rebuffed for all time. Far better to do any rebuffing herself.
Perhaps no human being is equipped to judge which is worse; inchoate longing with its attendant restlessness and irritability, or specific desire with its willful drive to achieve the desire.
I could have done with mother's beauty in my chosen profession, but on a stage I manage. Because it has nothing to do with what the face actually is, you know. It’s what you and your art can convince people the face is.
We only have so much to give, don’t we? And up there I’m not myself, or perhaps more correctly I’m a succession of selves. We must all be a profound mixture of selves, don’t you think? To me, acting is first and foremost intellect, and only after that, emotion. The one liberates the other, and polishes it. There’s so much more to it than simply crying or screaming or producing a convincing laugh. It’s wonderful, you know. Thinking myself into another self, someone I might have been, had the circumstances been there. That’s the secret. Not becoming someone else, but incorporating the role into me as if she was myself. And so she becomes me.