Montgomery Clift Quotations

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Nobody ever lies about being lonely.

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

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.

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?

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.

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.