Montgomery Clift Quotes

The only line that's wrong in Shakespeare is 'holding a mirror up to nature.' You hold a magnifying glass up to nature. As an actor you just enlarge it enough so that your audience can identify with the situation. If it were a mirror, we would have no art.

The thing that bugs me is the average woman's complete ignorance of the functional purpose of cosmetics, which is to supplement, not conceal.

Nobody ever lies about being lonely.

James Dean's death had a profound effect on me. The instant I heard about it, I vomited. I don't know why.

Look, if you're playing Romeo and your Juliet is a pig, you find something you can love about pigs!

A man should be what he can do.

Look, I'm not odd. I'm just trying to be an actor; not a movie star, an actor.

Noah, from 'The Young Lions' (1958), was the best performance of my life. I couldn't have given more of myself. I'll never be able to do it again. Never.

The sadness of our existence should not leave us blunted, on the contrary--how to remain thin-skinned, vulnerable and stay alive?

I have enough money to get by. I'm not independently wealthy, just independently lazy, I suppose.

If a man don't go his own way, he is nothing.

I don't want to be labeled as either a pansy or a heterosexual. Labeling is so self-limiting. We are what we do - not what we say we are.

Look! Look! If you look really hard at things you'll forget you're going to die.

The closer we come to the negative, to death, the more we blossom.

I keep my family out of my public life because it can be an awful nuisance to them. What's my mother going to tell strangers anyway? That I was a cute baby and that she's terribly proud of me? Nuts. Who cares?

I have the same problem as Marilyn. We attract people the way honey does bees, but they're generally the wrong kind of people. People who want something from us - if only our energy. We need a period of being alone to become ourselves.

Failure and its accompanying misery is for the artist his most vital source of creative energy.