Louise Brooks Quotes & Sayings

Every actor has a natural animosity toward every other actor, present or absent, living or dead. — Louise Brooks

I have been taking stock of my 50 years since I left Wichita in 1922 at the age of 15 to become a dancer with Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn. How I have existed fills me with horror. For I have failed in everything
spelling, arithmetic, riding, tennis, golf; dancing, singing, acting; wife, mistress, whore, friend. Even cooking.
And I do not excuse myself with the usual escape of 'not trying.' I tried with all my heart. — Louise Brooks

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

The tragedy of film history is that it is fabricated, falsified, by the very people who make film history. — Louise Brooks

Writing is 1 percent inspiration, and 99 percent elimination. — Louise Brooks

Over the years I suffered poverty and rejection and came to believe that my mother had formed me for a freedom that was unattainable, a delusion. Then ... I was ... confined to this small apartment in this alien city of Rochester. ... Looking about, I saw millions of old people in my situation, wailing like lost puppies because they were alone and had no one to talk to. But they had become enslaved by habits which bound their lives to warm bodies that talked. I was free! Although my mother had ceased to be a warm body in 1944, she had not forsaken me. She comforts me with every book I read. Once again I am five, leaning on her shoulder, learning the words as she reads aloud 'Alice in Wonderland'. — Louise Brooks

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

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

[about Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle during the filming of Windy Riley Goes Hollywood (1931)]: Oh, I thought he was magnificent in films. He was a wonderful dancer... a wonderful ballroom dancer, in his heyday. It was like floating in the arms of a huge donut... really delightful. — Louise Brooks

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. — Louise Brooks

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. — Louise Brooks

And so I have remained, in relentless pursuit of truth and excellence, an unforgiving executioner of the bogus, an abomination to all but those few people who have overcome their aversion to truth in order to free whatever is good in them. — Louise Brooks

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

In writing the history of a life I believe absolutely that the reader cannot understand the character and deeds of the subject unless he is given a basic understanding of that person's sexual loves and hates and conflicts. It is the only way the reader can make sense out of innumerable apparently senseless actions. — Louise Brooks

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

I learned to act by watching Martha Graham dance, and I learned to dance by watching Charlie Chaplin act. — Louise Brooks

In my dreams I am not crippled. In my dreams, I dance. — Louise Brooks

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. — Louise Brooks

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

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 ... — Louise Brooks

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. — Louise Brooks

If I ever bore you, it'll be with a knife. — Louise Brooks