“Life is a little like a message in a bottle, to be carried by the winds and the tides.”
― Gene Tierney
“Some women feel the best cure for a broken heart is a new beau.”
― Gene Tierney
“When my mood was high, I seemed normal, even buoyant. I felt smarter. I had secrets. I could see God in a light bulb.”
― Gene Tierney
“Wealth, beauty, and fame are transient. When those are gone, little is left except the need to be useful.”
― Gene Tierney
“Jealousy is, I think, the worst of all faults because it makes a victim of both parties.”
― Gene Tierney
“I was going to live on my salary or go down swinging.”
― Gene Tierney
“When you have spent an important part of your life playing Let’s Pretend, it’s often easy to see symbolism where none exists.”
― Gene Tierney
“Houses are one of my passions. I probably should have been an interior decorator.”
― Gene Tierney
“I had known Cole Porter in Hollywood and New York, spent many a warm hour at his home, and met the talented and original people who were drawn to him.”
― Gene Tierney
“Unlike the stage, I never found it helpful to be good in a bad movie.”
― Gene Tierney
“My departure from Hollywood was described as a walk-out. No one understood that I was cracking up.”
― Gene Tierney
“It is difficult to write about any form of mental disease, especially your own, without sounding as if you were examining a bug under glass.”
― Gene Tierney
“In the months leading up to World War II, there was a tendency among many Americans to talk absently about the trouble in Europe. Nothing that happened an ocean away seemed very threatening.”
― Gene Tierney
“I simply did not want my face to be my talent.”
― Gene Tierney
“I followed the same diet for 20 years, eliminating starches, living on salads, lean meat, and small portions.”
― Gene Tierney
“I existed in a world that never is – the prison of the mind.”
― Gene Tierney
“For years it never occurred to me to question the judgment of those in charge at the studio.”
― Gene Tierney
“Everyone should see Hollywood once, I think, through the eyes of a teenage girl who has just passed a screen test.”
― Gene Tierney
“When I met Jack Kennedy, he was a serious young man with a dream. He was not a womanizer, not as I understood the term.”
― Gene Tierney
“What a different world it was when I first sailed for Europe in 1930, with my mother, sister, and brother to spend six months abroad.”
― Gene Tierney
“We cannot calculate the numbers of people who left, fled or were fished out of Europe just ahead of the Holocaust.”
― Gene Tierney
“Trying to make order out of my life was like trying to pick up a jellyfish.”
― Gene Tierney
“Throughout my career, I was to be cast as a frontier girl, an aristocrat, an Arabian, a Eurasian, a Polynesian, and a Chinese.”
― Gene Tierney
“Those who become mentally ill often have a history of chronic pain.”
― Gene Tierney
“There were days that I worked all the time, without a layoff, or a rest, finishing one picture and reporting for another sometimes on the same day.”
― Gene Tierney
“The word actress has always seemed less a job description to me than a title.”
― Gene Tierney
“The main cause of my difficulties stemmed from the tragedy of my daughter’s unsound birth and my inability to face my feelings.”
― Gene Tierney
“The Howard Hughes I knew began to change after his plane crash in 1941.”
― Gene Tierney
“The Hollywood structure was monopolistic, run by four or five big studios.”
― Gene Tierney
“Rehearsals and screening rooms are often unreliable because they can’t provide the chemistry between an audience and what appears on the stage or screen.”
― Gene Tierney
“My mother would not talk to me for weeks, would not stay under my roof for as long as I was married to Oleg.”
― Gene Tierney
“Men are wonderful. I adore them. They always give you the benefit of the doubt.”
― Gene Tierney
“It was the fashion of the time, still is, to feel that all actors are neurotic, or they would not be actors.”
― Gene Tierney
“In my early days in Hollywood I tried to be economical. I designed my own clothes, much to my mother’s distress.”
― Gene Tierney
“In later years, I craved foods that were almost always fattening.”
― Gene Tierney
“I’m not sure I can explain the nature of Jack Kennedy’s charm, but he took life just as it came.”
― Gene Tierney
“I was plunged into what was known as the debutante social whirl. This was one of the ways fathers justified their own hard work and sacrifices.”
― Gene Tierney
“I was not cut out to be a rebel.”
― Gene Tierney
“I was fortunate enough to work under directors who were, most of them, brilliant, emotional men.”
― Gene Tierney
“I was fine when it came to cheering up others, not so fine with myself.”
― Gene Tierney
“I used up every cent I earned as an actress.”
― Gene Tierney
“I used to annoy my father by telling him how much I felt luck was with me.”
― Gene Tierney
“I remember the 1940s as a time when we were united in a way known only to that generation. We belonged to a common cause-the war.”
― Gene Tierney
“I needed to be accepted, not humored. I intended to act.”
― Gene Tierney
“I loved to eat. For all of Hollywood’s rewards, I was hungry for most of those 20 years.”
― Gene Tierney
“I learned quickly at Columbia that the only eye that mattered was the one on the camera.”
― Gene Tierney
“I knew I could not cope with the future unless I was able to rediscover the past.”
― Gene Tierney
“I hole up now and then and do nothing for days but read.”
― Gene Tierney
“I have a role now that I think becomes me. I am a grandmother.”
― Gene Tierney
“I had no romantic interest in Gable. I considered him an older man.”
― Gene Tierney
“I had been offered a Hollywood contract before my 18th birthday. It gave me the spark I needed.”
― Gene Tierney
“I do not recall spending long hours in front of a mirror loving my reflection.”
― Gene Tierney
“I dated dozens of young men, had fun with all, made commitments to none.”
― Gene Tierney
“I ask myself: Would I have been any worse off if I had stayed home or lived on a farm instead of shock treatments and medication?”
― Gene Tierney
“I approached everything, my job, my family, my romances, with intensity.”
― Gene Tierney
“I am not the kind of woman who excuses her mistakes while reminding us of what used to be.”
― Gene Tierney
“I always tried to play my hunches.”
― Gene Tierney
“I admire anyone who rids himself of an addiction.”
― Gene Tierney
“Hollywood can be hard on women, but it did not cause my problems.”
― Gene Tierney
“Fonda and Gary Cooper had the best sense of timing of all the actors I knew.”
― Gene Tierney
“Eccentric behavior is not routinely noticed around a movie set.”
― Gene Tierney
“Day after day, I spent long afternoons in the talent pool, being told how to walk, how to talk, how to sit.”
― Gene Tierney
“Children don’t understand about people loving each other and then suddenly not.”
― Gene Tierney
“Chaplin was notoriously strict with his sons and rarely gave them spending money.”
― Gene Tierney
“Cars, furs, and gems were not my weaknesses.”
― Gene Tierney
“As an actress, I was trained to show emotion I did not feel, or no emotion at all.”
― Gene Tierney
“About my career I was serious and earnest, sometimes impatient.”
― Gene Tierney
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