Quotes from Bette Davis movies and TV shows

Birdie: There's a message from the bartender. Does Miss Channing know she ordered domestic gin by mistake?
Margo: The only thing I ordered by mistake is the guests. They're domestic, too, and they don't care what they drink as long as it burns.

Margo: Nice speech, Eve. But I wouldn't worry too much about your heart. You can always put that award where your heart ought to be.

Lloyd Richards: How about calling it a night?
Margo: And you pose as a playwright? A situation pregnant with possibilities and all you can think of is everybody go to sleep.

Margo: Margo Channing is ageless - spoken like a press agent.
Lloyd Richards: I know what I'm talking about. After all, they're my plays.
Margo: Spoken like an author. Lloyd, I'm not twenty-ish, I'm not thirty-ish. Three months ago I was forty years old. Forty. Four O. That slipped out. I hadn't quite made up my mind to admit it. Now I suddenly feel as if I've taken all my clothes off.

Lloyd Richards: There comes a time that a piano realises that it has not written a concerto.
Margo: And you, I take it, are the Paderewski who plays his concerto on me, the piano?

Margo: Peace and quiet is for libraries.

Bill Sampson: Have you no human consideration?
Margo: Show me a human, and I might have.

Margo: Lloyd, honey, be a playwright with guts. Write me one about a nice normal woman who just shoots her husband.

Margo: Bill's thirty-two. He looks thirty-two. He looked it five years ago, he'll look it twenty years from now. I hate men.

Margo: Why so remote Addison? I should think you'd be at your protégé's side lending her moral support.
Addison DeWitt: Miss Casswell at the moment is where I can lend no support, moral or otherwise.
Margo: In the lady's, shall we say, lounge?
Addison DeWitt: ...being violently ill to her tummy.

Bill Sampson: Outside of a beehive, Margo, your behavior would not be considered either queenly or motherly.
Margo: You are in a beehive, pal. Didn't you know? We are all busy little bees, full of stings, making honey day and night. Aren't we honey?

Margo: You're not much of a bargain, you know. You're conceited and thoughtless and messy.

Margo: As it happens, there are particular aspects of my life to which I would like to maintain sole and exclusive rights and privileges.
Bill Sampson: For instance what?
Margo: For instance: you.

Margo: Don't get up. And please stop acting as if I were the queen mother.
Eve: I'm sorry, I.

Llyod Richards: I understand that your understudy, Miss Harrington, has given her notice.
Margo: Too bad.
Bill Sampson: I'm broken up about it.

Margo: You bought the new girdles a size smaller, I can feel it.
Birdie: Something maybe grew a size larger.
Margo: When we get home you're going to get into one of those girdles and act for two and a half hours.
Birdie: I couldn't get into the girdle in two and a half hours.

Bill Sampson: You have every reason for happiness.
Margo: Except happiness.

Margo: She thinks only of me, doesn't she?
Birdie: Well, let's say she thinks only about you, anyway.
Margo: How do you mean that?
Birdie: I'll tell you how: like... like she's studying you, like you was a play or a book or a set of blueprints - how you walk, talk, eat, think, sleep.
Margo: I'm sure that's very flattering, Birdie. I'm sure there's nothing wrong with it.

Margo: I'll admit I may have seen better days, but I'm still not to be had for the price of a cocktail, like a salted peanut.

Lloyd Richards: I shall never understand the weird process by which a body with a voice suddenly fancies itself as a mind. Just when exactly does an actress decide they're HER words she's saying, and HER thoughts she's expressing?
Margo: Usually at the point where she has to rewrite and rethink them, to keep the audience from leaving the theatre.

More All About Eve quotes

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