Louise Brooks Quotations

I have a gift for enraging people, but if I ever bore you it will be with a knife.

The great art of films does not consist of descriptive movement of face and body but in the movements of thought and soul transmitted in a kind of intense isolation.

In my dreams I am not crippled. In my dreams, I dance.

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

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

Every actor has a natural animosity toward every other actor, present or absent, living or dead

There is no other occupation in the world that so closely resembled enslavement as the career of a film star.

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.

Writing is 1 percent inspiration, and 99 percent elimination.

When I went to Hollywood in 1927, the girls were wearing lumpy sweaters and skirts. I was wearing sleek suits and half naked beaded gowns and piles and piles of furs.

A well dressed woman, even though her purse is painfully empty, can conquer the world.

Anyone who has achieved excellence in any form knows that it comes as a result of ceaseless concentration.