Send me flowers while I'm alive. They won't do me a damn bit of good after I'm dead.

You have to be self-reliant and strong to survive in this town. Otherwise you will be destroyed.

[To the mother of two unruly children in a restaurant after the woman said she really didn't know what to do with her children:] Have you tried infanticide?

You know the troubles I've had with my two older children. I can't understand why it turned out so badly. I tried to give them everything. I loved them and tried to keep them near me, even when they didn't return my love. Well, I couldn't make them love me, but they could have shown some respect. I couldn't insist on love, but I could insist on respect.

When television killed comedy and love stories, the movie makers went in slugging. They offered the downbeat, the degenerate as competition. This seems to me to be a sad campaign for Hollywood to use to combat box office disaster.

I used to wash my hands every ten minutes. I couldn't step out of the house unless I had gloves on. I wouldn't smoke a cigarette unless I opened the pack myself, and I would never use another cigarette out of that pack if someone else had touched it.

While making "Possessed", I wept each morning on my drive to the studio, and I wept all the way back home. I found it impossible to sleep at night, so I'd lie in bed contemplating the future. I fear it with all my heart and soul even as I fear the dark.