All About Eve (1950)
Quotes
Margo: Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy night!
Margo: Nice speech, Eve. But I wouldn't worry too much about your heart. You can always put that award where your heart ought to be.
Margo: Bill's thirty-two. He looks thirty-two. He looked it five years ago, he'll look it twenty years from now. I hate men.
Margo: Lloyd, honey, be a playwright with guts. Write me one about a nice normal woman who just shoots her husband.
Margo: Funny business, a woman's career - the things you drop on your way up the ladder so you can move faster. You forget you'll need them again when you get back to being a woman. That's one career all females have in common, whether we like it or not: being a woman. Sooner or later, we've got to work at it, no matter how many other careers we've had or wanted. And in the last analysis, nothing's any good unless you can look up just before dinner or turn around in bed, and there he is. Without that, you're not a woman. You're something with a French provincial office or a book full of clippings, but you're not a woman. Slow curtain, the end.
Birdie: What a story! Everything but the bloodhounds snappin' at her rear end.
[a butler passes by]
Miss Casswell: Oh, waiter!
Addison DeWitt: That is not a waiter, my dear, that is a butler.
Miss Casswell: Well, I can't yell "Oh butler!" can I? Maybe somebody's name is Butler.
Addison DeWitt: You have a point. An idiotic one, but a point.
Miss Casswell: I don't want to make trouble. All I want is a drink.
Max Fabian: Leave it to me. I'll get you one.
Miss Casswell: Thank you, Mr. Fabian.
Addison DeWitt: Well done! I can see your career rise in the east like the sun.
Addison DeWitt: [voiceover] Margo Channing is a star of the theater. She made her first stage appearance at the age of four in Midsummer Night's Dream. She played a fairy and entered, quite unexpectedly, stark naked. She has been a star ever since. Margo is a great star, a true star. She never was or will be anything less or anything else.
Margo: So many people know me. I wish I did. I wish someone would tell me about me.
Karen: You're Margo, just Margo.
Margo: And what is that, besides something spelled out in light bulbs, I mean - besides something called a temperament, which consists mostly of swooping about on a broomstick and screaming at the top of my voice? Infants behave the way I do, you know. They carry on and misbehave - they'd get drunk if they knew how - when they can't have what they want, when they feel unwanted or insecure or unloved.
Margo: I'll admit I may have seen better days, but I'm still not to be had for the price of a cocktail, like a salted peanut.
Addison DeWitt: That I should want you at all, suddenly strikes me as the height of improbability. But that, in itself, is probably the reason. You're an improbable person, Eve, and so am I. We have that in common. Also, our contempt for humanity and inability to love, and be loved, insatiable ambition, and talent. We deserve each other.
Bill Sampson: The theatre. The theatre. What book of rules say the theatre exists only within some ugly buildings crowded into one square mile of New York City? Or London? Paris or Vienna? Listen, Junior, and learn. Do you wanna know what the theatre is? A flea circus. Also opera. Also rodeos, carnivals, ballets, Indian tribal dances, Punch and Judy, a one-man band, all theatre. Wherever there's magic and make-believe and an audience, there's theatre. Donald Duck, Ibsen and The Lone Ranger. Sarah Bernhardt and Poodles Hanneford. Lunt and Fontanne, Betty Grable. Rex the Wild Horse, Eleonora Duse, all theatre. You don't understand them all. You don't like them all. Why should you? The theatre's for everybody, you included, but not exclusively. So, don't approve or disapprove. It may not be your theatre, but it's theatre for somebody, somewhere.
Addison DeWitt: And what's your name?
Phoebe: Phoebe.
Addison DeWitt: Phoebe?
Phoebe: I call myself Phoebe.
Addison DeWitt: And why not? Tell me, Phoebe, do you want someday to have an award like that of your own?
Phoebe: More than anything else in the world.
Addison DeWitt: Then you must ask Miss Harrington how to get one. Miss Harrington knows all about it.
Lloyd Richards: That bitter cynicism of yours is something you've acquired since you left Radcliffe!
Karen: The cynicism you refer to, I acquired the day I discovered I was different from little boys!
Addison DeWitt: [voiceover intro] To those of you who do not read, attend the theater, listen to unsponsored radio programs, or know anything of the world in which you live, it is perhaps necessary to introduce myself. My name is Addison DeWitt. My native habitat is the theater. In it, I toil not, neither do I spin. I am a critic and commentator. I am essential to the theater.
Margo: I detest cheap sentiment.
Eve: If there's nothing else, there's applause. I've listened backstage to people applaud. It's like - like waves of love coming over the footlights and wrapping you up. Imagine, to know every night that different hundreds of people love you. They smile, their eyes shine, you've pleased them. They want you. You belong. Just that alone is worth anything.
Birdie: The bed looks like a dead animal act.
Margo: As it happens, there are particular aspects of my life to which I would like to maintain sole and exclusive rights and privileges.
Bill Sampson: For instance what?
Margo: For instance: you!
Lloyd Richards: How about calling it a night?
Margo: And you pose as a playwright? A situation pregnant with possibilities and all you can think of is everybody go to sleep.
Miss Casswell: Tell me this, do they have auditions for television?
Addison DeWitt: That's, uh, all television is, my dear, nothing but auditions.
Addison DeWitt: You could sleep now, couldn't you?
Eve: Why not?
Addison DeWitt: The mark of a true killer: sleep tight, rest easy, and come out fighting.
Lloyd Richards: I shall never understand the weird process by which a body with a voice suddenly fancies itself as a mind. Just when exactly does an actress decide they're HER words she's saying, and HER thoughts she's expressing?
Margo: Usually at the point where she has to rewrite and rethink them, to keep the audience from leaving the theatre!
[on theatrical producers]
Miss Casswell: Why do they always look like unhappy rabbits?
Bill Sampson: This is my cue to take you in my arms and reassure you. But I'm not going to - I'm too mad.
Margo: Guilty!
Bill Sampson: Mad! Darling, there are certain characteristics for which you are famous, on stage and off. I love you for some of them, in spite of others. I haven't let those become too important. They're part of your equipment for getting along in what is laughingly called our environment. You have to keep your teeth sharp - all right - but I will not have you sharpen them on me, or on Eve!
Margo: What about her teeth? What about her fangs?
Bill Sampson: She hasn't cut them yet, and you know it! So when you start judging an idealistic, dreamy-eyed kid by the barroom Benzedrine standards of this megalomaniac society, I won't have it! Eve Harrington has never, by word, look, thought, or suggestion indicated anything to me but her adoration for you and her happiness at our being in love. And to intimate anything else doesn't spell jealousy to me - it spells a paranoiac insecurity that you should be ashamed of!
Margo: Cut! Print it! What happens in the next reel? Do I get dragged off screaming to the snake pits?
Addison DeWitt: Why not read my column to pass the time? The minutes will fly like hours.
Addison DeWitt: There never was, and there never will be, another like you.
Bill Sampson: Have you no human consideration?
Margo: Show me a human, and I might have!
Lloyd Richards: A Hollywood movie star just arrived.
Margo: Shucks, and I sent my autograph book to the cleaner.
Bill Sampson: We have to go to City Hall for the marriage license and blood test.
Margo: I'd marry you if it turned out you had no blood at all.
Margo: Heaven help me. I love a psychotic!
Bill Sampson: Outside of a beehive, Margo, your behavior would not be considered either queenly or motherly.
Margo: You are in a beehive, pal. Didn't you know? We are all busy little bees, full of stings, making honey day and night. Aren't we honey?
Margo: [in front of her boyfriend, Bill] I love you, Max. I really mean it. I love you. Come to the pantry.
[she leaves]
Max Fabian: [to Bill] She loves me like a father. Also, she's loaded.
Margo: Thank you, Eve. I'd like a martini, very dry.
Bill Sampson: I'll get it.
[to Eve]
Bill Sampson: What'll you have?
Margo: A milkshake?
Eve: A martini, very dry, please.
Addison DeWitt: What do you take me for?
Eve: I don't know that I'd take you for anything.
Addison DeWitt: Is it possible, even conceivable, that you've confused me with that gang of backward children you play tricks on, that you have the same contempt for me as you have for them?
Eve: I'm sure you mean something by that, Addison, but I don't know what.
Addison DeWitt: Look closely, Eve. It's time you did. I am Addison DeWitt. I am nobody's fool, least of all yours.
Eve: I never intended you to be.
Addison DeWitt: Yes you did, and you still do.
Eve: I still don't know what you're getting at, but right now I want to take my nap. It's important...
Addison DeWitt: It's important right now that we talk, killer to killer.
Eve: Champion to champion.
Addison DeWitt: Not with me, you're no champion. You're stepping way up in class.
Eve: Addison, will you please say what you have to say, plainly and distinctly, and then get out, so I can take my nap?
Addison DeWitt: Very well - plainly and distinctly - though I consider it unnecessary because you know as well as I do what I'm going to say: Lloyd may leave Karen, but he will not leave Karen for you.
Eve: What do you mean by that?
Addison DeWitt: More plainly and more distinctly: I have not come to New Haven to see the play, discuss your dreams, or pull the ivy from the walls of Yale. I have come here to tell you that you will not marry Lloyd, or anyone else for that matter, because I will not permit it.
Eve: What have you got to do with it?
Addison DeWitt: Everything, because after tonight, you will belong to me.
Eve: Belong? To you? I can't believe my ears!
Addison DeWitt: What a dull cliché.
Eve: Belong to you - why, that sounds medieval, something out of an old melodrama!
Addison DeWitt: So does the history of the world for the past twenty years. I don't enjoy putting it as bluntly as this. Frankly, I'd hoped that somehow you would have known, that you would have taken it for granted that you and I...
Eve: Taken it for granted that you and I...
[laughs]
Addison DeWitt: [slaps her] Now, remember, as long as you live, never to laugh at me - at anything or anyone else, but never at me.
Eve: [walks to the door and opens it] Get out!
Addison DeWitt: You're too short for that gesture. Besides, it went out with Mrs. Fiske.
Margo: I'm being rude now, aren't I? Or should I say, ain't I?
Addison DeWitt: You're maudlin and full of self-pity. You're magnificent!
[Bill is saying goodbye to Birdie as he departs for Hollywood]
Bill Sampson: Any messages? What do you want me to tell Tyrone Power?
Birdie: Just give him my phone number; I'll tell him myself.
Bill Sampson: Don't cry. Just score it as an incomplete forward pass.
Bill Sampson: You know, there isn't a playwright in the world who could make me believe this would happen between two adult people. Goodbye, Margo.
Margo: Bill? Where are you going? To find Eve?
Bill Sampson: That suddenly makes the whole thing believable.
Addison DeWitt: Too bad, we're gonna miss the third act. They're gonna play it offstage.
Lloyd Richards: The general atmosphere is very Macbethish. What has or is about to happen?
Bill Sampson: Wherever there's magic and make-believe and an audience, there's theatre.
Margo: [to Bill] You be the host. It's your party. Happy birthday, welcome home, and we who are about to die salute you.
[Margo is getting drunk at the party]
Bill Sampson: Many of your guests have been wondering when they may be permitted to view the body. Where has it been laid out?
Margo: It hasn't been laid out, we haven't finished with the embalming. As a matter of fact, you're looking at it - the remains of Margo Channing, sitting up. It is my last wish to be buried sitting up.
Margo: Peace and quiet is for libraries!
Margo: Margo Channing is ageless - spoken like a press agent.
Lloyd Richards: I know what I'm talking about. After all, they're my plays.
Margo: Spoken like an author. Lloyd, I'm not twenty-ish, I'm not thirty-ish. Three months ago I was forty years old. Forty. Four O. That slipped out. I hadn't quite made up my mind to admit it. Now I suddenly feel as if I've taken all my clothes off.
Margo: I distinctly remember, Addison, crossing you off of my guest list. What are you doing here?
Addison DeWitt: Dear Margo, you were an unforgettable Peter Pan. You must play it again, soon. You remember Miss Casswell.
Margo: I do not. How do you do?
Miss Casswell: We've never met. Maybe that's why?
Addison DeWitt: Miss Casswell is an actress, a graduate of the Copacabana school of the dramatic arts.
[Eve enters]
Addison DeWitt: Ah, Eve.
Eve: Good evening, Mr. DeWitt.
Margo: I'd no idea you two knew each other.
Addison DeWitt: This must be at long last our formal introduction. Until now, we've only met in passing.
Miss Casswell: That's how you met me... in passing.
Margo: Eve, this is an old friend of Mr. DeWitt's mother. Miss Casswell, Miss Harrington.
Eve: Miss Casswell.
Miss Casswell: How do you do?
Margo: Addison, I've been waiting for you to meet Eve for the longest time.
Addison DeWitt: It could only have been your natural timidity that kept you from mentioning it.
Margo: You've heard of her great interest in the theater.
Addison DeWitt: We have that in common.
Margo: Then you two must have a long talk.
Eve: I'm afraid Mr. DeWitt would find me boring before too long.
Miss Casswell: You won't bore him, honey. You won't even get a chance to talk.
Addison DeWitt: Claudia, come here.
[takes her aside]
Addison DeWitt: You see that man, that's Max Fabian, the producer. Now, go do yourself some good.
Miss Casswell: Why do they always look like unhappy rabbits?
Addison DeWitt: Because that's what they are.
[taking her coat]
Addison DeWitt: Now, go and make him happy.
[goes back to Margo and drapes the coat over her arm]
Addison DeWitt: Now, don't worry about your little charge, she'll be in safe hands.
[walks off with Eve]
Margo: [watches them go, then lifts her martini] Ah-men.
Addison DeWitt: We all have abnormalities in common. We're a breed apart from the rest of humanity, we theatre folk. We are the original displaced personalities.
Margo: You're not much of a bargain, you know. You're conceited and thoughtless and messy.
Addison DeWitt: We all come into this world with our little egos equipped with individual horns. If we don't blow them, who else will?
Max Fabian: Let the rest of the world beat their brains out for a buck. It's friends that count. And I got friends.
Addison DeWitt: [voiceover] The minor awards, as you can see, have already been presented. Minor awards are for such as the writer and director, since their function is merely to construct a tower so that the world can applaud a light which flashes on top of it. And no brighter light has ever dazzled the eye than Eve Harrington.
Addison DeWitt: Well, Max has gone to a great deal of trouble. This is going to be an elaborate party, and it's for you.
Eve: No it isn't.
[raises the award statuette]
Eve: It's for this.
Addison DeWitt: It's the same thing, isn't it?
Eve: Exactly. Here, take it to the party instead of me.
[hands it to him]
Lloyd Richards: What makes you think either Miller or Sherwood would stand for the nonsense I take from you? You'd better stick to Beaumont and Fletcher! They've been dead for three hundred years!
Margo: ALL playwrights should be dead for three hundred years!
Bill Sampson: You have every reason for happiness.
Margo: Except happiness!
Bill Sampson: [to Eve] "Don't let it worry you", said the camera man, "Even DeMille couldn't see anything looking through the wrong end!" So that was the first and last...
Margo: [entering] Don't let me kill the point. Or isn't it a story for grownups?
Bill Sampson: You've heard it - about the time I looked into the wrong end of the camera finder.
Margo: Remind me to tell you about the time I looked into the heart of an artichoke.
Eve: I'd like to hear it.
Margo: Some snowy night, in front of the fire.
Bill Sampson: Looks like I'm going to have a very fancy party...
Margo: I thought you were going to be late.
Bill Sampson: When I'm guest of honor?
Margo: I had no idea you were even here.
Bill Sampson: I ran into Eve on my way upstairs; she told me you were dressing.
Margo: That never stopped you before.
Bill Sampson: Well, we started talking, she wanted to know all about Hollywood, she seemed so interested...
Margo: She's a girl of so many interests.
Bill Sampson: It's a pretty rare quality these days.
Margo: She's a girl of so many rare qualities.
Bill Sampson: So she seems.
Margo: So you've pointed out, so often. So many qualities, so often. Her loyalty, efficiency, devotion, warmth, affection - and so young! So young and so fair...
Margo: I'll admit I may have seen better days, but I'm still not to be had for the price of a cocktail like a salted peanut.
Margo: Why so remote Addison? I should think you'd be at your protégé's side lending her moral support.
Addison DeWitt: Miss Casswell at the moment is where I can lend no support, moral or otherwise.
Margo: In the lady's, shall we say, lounge?
Addison DeWitt: ...being violently ill to her tummy.
Birdie: We now got everything a dressing room needs except a basketball hoop.
Lloyd Richards: Karen, let me tell you about Eve. She's got everything - a born actress. Sensitive, understanding, young, exciting, vibrant...
Karen: Don't run out of adjectives, dear.
Lloyd Richards: There are very few moments in life as good as this. Let's remember it. To each of us and all of us, never have we been more close, may we never be farther apart.
Lloyd Richards: There comes a time that a piano realizes that it has not written a concerto.
Margo: And you, I take it, are the Paderewski who plays his concerto on me, the piano?
Bill Sampson: I start shooting a week from Monday. Zanuck is impatient. He wants me, he needs me.
Margo: Zanuck, Zanuck, Zanuck. What are you two, lovers?
Llyod Richards: I understand that your understudy, Miss Harrington, has given her notice.
Margo: Too bad.
Bill Sampson: I'm broken up about it.
Karen: Nothing is forever in the Theatre. Whatever it is, it's here, it flares up, burns hot and then it's gone.
Llyod Richards: You knew when you came in that the audition was over, that Eve was your understudy, playing that childish little game of cat and mouse.
Margo: Not mouse, never mouse. If anything *rat*!
Margo: She thinks only of me, doesn't she?
Birdie: Well, let's say she thinks only about you, anyway.
Margo: How do you mean that?
Birdie: I'll tell you how: like... like she's studying you, like you was a play or a book or a set of blueprints - how you walk, talk, eat, think, sleep...
Margo: I'm sure that's very flattering, Birdie. I'm sure there's nothing wrong with it.
Margo: Where is Princess... fire and music?
Margo: Please don't play governess, Karen. I haven't your unyielding good taste. I wish *I* could have gone to Radcliffe, too, but Father wouldn't hear of it... He needed help behind the notions counter.
Margo: [continues] I'm being rude now, aren't I? Or should I say "ain't I"?
Addison DeWitt: You're maudlin and full of self-pity. You're magnificent.
Bill Sampson: I can't believe you're making this up. It sounds like something out of an old Clyde Fitch play!
Margo: Clyde Fitch, though you may not think so, was well before my time.
Bill Sampson: I've always denied the legend that you were in "Our American Cousin" the night Lincoln was shot.
Margo: I *don't* think that's funny!
Bill Sampson: [to Eve] What I go after, I want to go after. I don't want it to come after me.
Llyod Richards: Eve did mention the play, but in passing. She'd never ask to play a part like Cora. She'd never have the nerve.
Karen: Eve would ask Abbott to give her Costello.
Eve: I will regard this great honor not so much as an award for what I have achieved, but a standard to hold against what I have yet to accomplish.
Margo: I'm a junkyard.
Karen: Where were we going that night, Lloyd and I? Funny, the things you remember and the things you don't.
Eve: When you're a secretary in a brewery, it's pretty hard to make-believe you're anything else. Everything is beer.
Bill Sampson: Real diamonds in a wig, the world we live in.
Karen: This beats all records for running, standing or jumping gall.
Karen: [Eve walks in, carrying the fur coat of a new arrival to Margo's party] Who'd show up at this hour? It's time people went home. Hold that coat up.
Karen: [Eve holds up a luxurious full-length fur coat, Karen lets out a whistle] Whose is it?
Eve: Some Hollywood movie star's. Her plane got in late.
Karen: Discouraging, isn't it? Women with furs like that where it never even gets cold.
Eve: Hollywood.
[tosses the fur coat on the bed]
Karen: [narrating] Newton, they say, thought of gravity by getting hit on the head by an apple. And the man who invented the steam-engine, he was watching a teakettle. But not me. My big idea came to me just sitting on a couch. That boot in the rear to Margo. Heaven knows, she had one coming. From me, from Lloyd, from Eve, Bill, Max and so on. We'd all felt those size fives of hers often enough. But how? The answer was buzzing around me like a fly. I had it. But I let it go. Screaming and calling names is one thing, but this could mean...
Karen: [continues] Why not? "Why," I said to myself, "not?" It would all seem perfectly legitimate. And only two people in the world would know. Also, the boot would land where it would do the most good for all concerned. After all, it was no more than a harmless joke which Margo herself would be the first to enjoy. And no reason why she shouldn't be told about it... in time.
Karen: [on the phone, calling Eve to let her in on her little "joke"] Hello. Will you please call Miss Eve Harrington to the phone?
Margo: It's obvious you're not a woman.
Bill Sampson: I've been aware of that for some time.
Margo: How was Miss Casswell?
Addison DeWitt: Frankly, I don't remember.
Margo: Just slipped your mind?
Addison DeWitt: Completely. Nor I am sure anyone else can tell you how Miss Casswell read or whether Miss Casswell read or rode a pogo stick.
Karen: [voiceover] It seems a lifetime ago. Lloyd always said that in the theatre a lifetime was a season and a season a lifetime.
Margo: He can't take his eyes off my legs.
Bill Sampson: Like a nylon lemon peel.
Margo: Byron couldn't have said it more graciously.
Margo: "I don't think you can rightly say we lost the war. We was more starved out, you might say. That's why I don't understand all these plays about love-starved Southern women. Love was one thing we were never starved for in the South."
Lloyd Richards: Margo's interview with a lady reporter from the South.
Birdie: And the minute it gets printed, they're gonna fire on Gettysburg all over again.
Margo: It was Fort Sumter they fired on.
Birdie: I never played Fort Sumter.
Addison DeWitt: It wasn't a reading, it was a performance. Brilliant! Vivid, something made of music and fire.
Margo: How nice.
Addison DeWitt: In time, she'll be what you are.
Margo: A mass of music and fire. That's me. An old kazoo with some sparklers.
Margo: Heartburn? It's that Miss Casswell. I don't see why she hasn't given Addison heartburn.
Bill Sampson: No heart to burn!
Margo: Everybody has a heart - except some people.
Eve: It's not modesty. I just don't try to kid myself.
Addison DeWitt: A revolutionary approach to the Theater.
Eve: I won't play tonight. I couldn't, not possibly. I couldn't go on.
Addison DeWitt: Couldn't go on? You'll give the performance of your life.
Lloyd Richards: You've been talking to that venomous fishwife Addison DeWitt!
Margo: In this case, apparently as trustworthy as the World Almanac!
Eve: I'll never forget this night as long as I live, and I'll never forget you for making it possible.
Bill Sampson: I don't agree, Addison.
Addison DeWitt: That happens to be your particular abnormality.
Margo: Bill's welcome home birthday party might go down in history. Even before the party started, I could smell disaster in the air. I knew it, I sensed it, even as I finished dressing for the blasted party.
Aged Actor: Surely, no actor is older than I. I've earned my place out of the sun.
Addison DeWitt: Hello. Who are you?
Phoebe: Miss Harrington's resting, Mr. Dewitt. She asked me to see who it is.
Addison DeWitt: Oh well, we won't disturb her rest. It seems Miss Harrington left her award in the taxicab. Will you give it to her? Tell me, how did you know my name?
Phoebe: [coquettishly] It's a very famous name, Mr. DeWitt.
Addison DeWitt: And what's your name?
Phoebe: Phoebe.
Addison DeWitt: [incredulously] Phoebe?
Phoebe: [bristling] I call myself Phoebe!
Addison DeWitt: And why not? Tell me, Phoebe, do you want some day to have an award like that of your own?
[noticing how enviously Phoebe holds and admires the trophy]
Phoebe: More than anything else in the world.
Addison DeWitt: Then you must ask Miss Harrington how to get one. Miss Harrington knows all about it.
[first lines - voiceover]
Addison DeWitt: The Sarah Siddons Award is perhaps unknown to you. It has been spared the sensational publicity of such questionable honors as the Pulitzer Prize and those awards presented annually by that film society. The distinguished-looking gentleman is an extremely old actor. Being an actor, he will go on speaking for some time. It is not important that you hear what he says.
Addison DeWitt: [voiceover] Eve. Eve, the golden girl. The cover girl. The girl next door, the girl on the moon. Time has been good to Eve. Life goes where she goes. She's been profiled, covered, revealed, reported, what she eats and what she wears and whom she knows and where she was and when and where she's going. Eve. You all know all about Eve.
Addison DeWitt: [voiceover] There are, in general, two types of theatrical producers. One has a great many wealthy friends who will risk a tax-deductible loss. This type is interested in art. The other is one to whom each production means potential ruin or fortune. This type is out to make a buck.
Addison DeWitt: [voiceover] No brighter light has ever dazzled the eye than Eve Harrington. Eve. But more of Eve later. All about Eve, in fact.
Bill Sampson: Nothing personal, Junior. No offense. It's just that there's so much bourgeois in this ivory greenroom they call the theatre, sometimes it gets up around my chin.
Karen: Good luck, genius.
Bill Sampson: Geniuses don't need good luck. I do.
Eve: With Eddie gone, my life went back to beer.
Margo: If she can act, she might not be bad. She looks like she might burn down a plantation.
Margo: Did she tell you about the theatre and what it meant?
Bill Sampson: No, I told her. I sounded off.
Margo: All the religions in the world rolled into one, and we're gods and goddesses.
Margo: Bill, don't get stuck on some glamour puss.
Bill Sampson: I'll try.
Margo: You're not much of a bargain, you know. You're conceited and thoughtless and messy.
Bill Sampson: Well, everybody can't be Gregory Peck.
Bill Sampson: Hey, Junior! Keep your eye on her. Don't let her get lonely. She's a loose lamb in a jungle.
Margo: If my guests do not like it here, I suggest they accompany you to the nursery, where I'm sure you will all feel more at home.
Karen: It's about time Margo realize that what's attractive on stage need *not* be attractive off.
Addison DeWitt: Elder statesmen of the theatre or cinema assure the public that actors and actresses are just plain folks, ignoring the fact that their greatest attraction to the public is their complete lack of resemblance to normal human beings.
Margo: You disapprove of me when I'm like this, don't you?
Lloyd Richards: Not exactly. Sometimes, though, I wish I understood you better.
Margo: When you do, let me in on it.
Karen: Lloyd says Margo compensates for underplaying on stage by overplaying reality.
Margo: Don't worry, Lloyd. I'll play your play. I'll wear rompers and come in rolling a hoop, if you like.
Miss Casswell: Now there's something a girl could make sacrifices for!
Bill Sampson: And probably has.
Miss Casswell: Sable!
Max Fabian: Sable? Did she say sable or Gable?
Miss Casswell: Either one.
Addison DeWitt: Margo, I have lived in the theatre as a Trappist monk lives in his faith. I have no other world, no other life. And once in a great while, I experience that moment of revelation for which all true believers wait and pray. You were one. Jeanne Eagels another, Paula Wessely, Hayes. There are others, three or four. Eve Harrington will be among them.
Margo: I take it she read well.
Margo: Think of your health. More time to relax in the fresh air at a racetrack.
Margo: More than anything in this world, I love Bill. And I want Bill. And I want him to want me. But me, not Margo Channing. And if I can't tell them apart, how can he?
Addison DeWitt: [voiceover] Those who remained cheered loudly, lustily, and long for Eve.
Margo: Max, you sly puss.
Lloyd Richards: Who's to give her that boot in the rear she needs and deserves?
Addison DeWitt: I think the time has come for you to shed some of your humility. It is just as false not to blow your horn at all as it is to blow it too loudly.
Eve: You're always after truth on the stage. What about off?
Addison DeWitt: Ah! Feeling better, my dear?
Miss Casswell: Like I just swam the English Channel. Now what?
Addison DeWitt: Your next move, it seems to me, should be towards television.
Addison DeWitt: The audition is over.
Margo: It can't be. I came here to read with Miss Casswell. I promised Max.
Addison DeWitt: The audition was at 2.30. It's now nearly four.
Margo: Is it really? I must start wearing a watch.
Karen: Lloyd Richards, you are not to consider giving that contemptible little worm the part of Cora!
Addison DeWitt: By the smartness of your dress I take it that your luncheon companion is a lady?
Karen: Margo.
Addison DeWitt: Margo lunching in public?
Karen: Oh, it's a new Margo; but, she's just as late as the old one.
Karen: I guess at this point I'm what the French call "de trop."
Bill Sampson: Maybe just a little around the edges.
Eve: I'm about to go into the shower. I won't be able to hear you.
Addison DeWitt: Well, it can wait. Where would you like to go? We must make this a special night.
Eve: You take charge.
Addison DeWitt: I believe I will.
Margo: In this rat race, everybody's guilty until they're proved innocent. One of the differences between the theatre and civilization.
Addison DeWitt: Now we must join our sunburned eager beaver.
Karen: [voiceover] Margo and I were having lunch at 21, just like girlfriends, with hats on.
Margo: The little witch must have sent out Indian Runners, snatching critics out of bars and steam rooms and museums or wherever they hole up!
Margo: If Equity or my lawyer can't or won't do anything about it, I shall personally stuff that pathetic little lost lamb down Mr. DeWitt's ugly throat!
Lloyd Richards: Margo and Bill want us to meet them in the Cub Room tonight after the theater for a bottle of wine.
Karen: Margo Channing in the Cub Room? I couldn't be more surprised if she'd said Grant's Tomb.
Margo: Karen, in all the years of our friendship, I have never let you go to the ladies' room alone. Now I must.
Margo: Isn't it a lovely room? The Cub Room. What a lovely, clever name. Where the elite meet.
Eve: What a day. What a heavenly day!
Addison DeWitt: D-day.
Eve: Just like it.
Addison DeWitt: And tomorrow morning, you will have won your beachhead on the shores of immortality.
Eve: Stop rehearsing your column.
Margo: It's a great part and a fine play. But not for me anymore. Not for a foursquare, upright, downright, forthright, married lady.
Margo: Even Eve. I forgive Eve. There they go. There goes Eve. Eve Evil, little Miss Evil.
Karen: It strikes me that Eve's disloyalty and ingratitude must be contagious!
Lloyd Richards: All this fuss and hysteria because of an impulsive kid got carried away by excitement and the conniving of a professional manure-slinger named DeWitt. She apologized, didn't she?
Karen: On her knees, I've no doubt!
Addison DeWitt: I had lunch with Karen not three hours ago. As always with women who try to find out things, she told more than she learnt.
Addison DeWitt: Your name is not Eve Harrington. It's Gertrude Slescynski.
Eve: What of it?
Eve: It'll be a night to remember. It'll bring me everything I've ever wanted. The end of an old road, the beginning of a new one.
Addison DeWitt: All paved with diamonds and gold?
Eve: You know me better than that.
Addison DeWitt: Paved with what, then?
Eve: Stars.
Karen: They'll do as they're told.
Bill Sampson: Knit me a muffler?
Bill Sampson: Karen, you're a Gibson girl.
Karen: Now you're quoting Addison - or Eve.
