Bette Davis Monologues

Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy night!

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

Funny business, a woman's career - the things you drop on your way up the ladder so you can move faster. You forget you'll need them again when you get back to being a woman. That's one career all females have in common, whether we like it or not: being a woman. Sooner or later, we've got to work at it, no matter how many other careers we've had or wanted. And in the last analysis, nothing's any good unless you can look up just before dinner or turn around in bed, and there he is. Without that, you're not a woman. You're something with a French provincial office or a book full of clippings, but you're not a woman. Slow curtain, the end.

And what is that, besides something spelled out in light bulbs, I mean - besides something called a temperament, which consists mostly of swooping about on a broomstick and screaming at the top of my voice? Infants behave the way I do, you know. They carry on and misbehave - they'd get drunk if they knew how - when they can't have what they want, when they feel unwanted or insecure or unloved.

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.

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.

Please don't play governess, Karen. I haven't your unyielding good taste. I wish I could have gone to Radcliffe, too, but Father wouldn't hear of it… He needed help behind the notions counter.

"I don't think you can rightly say we lost the war. We was more starved out, you might say. That's why I don't understand all these plays about love-starved Southern women. Love was one thing we were never starved for in the South."

Bill's welcome home birthday party might go down in history. Even before the party started, I could smell disaster in the air. I knew it, I sensed it, even as I finished dressing for the blasted party.

If she can act, she might not be bad. She looks like she might burn down a plantation.

If my guests do not like it here, I suggest they accompany you to the nursery, where I'm sure you will all feel more at home.

Don't worry, Lloyd. I'll play your play. I'll wear rompers and come in rolling a hoop, if you like.

Think of your health. More time to relax in the fresh air at a racetrack.

More than anything in this world, I love Bill. And I want Bill. And I want him to want me. But me, not Margo Channing. And if I can't tell them apart, how can he?

In this rat race, everybody's guilty until they're proved innocent. One of the differences between the theatre and civilization.

The little witch must have sent out Indian Runners, snatching critics out of bars and steam rooms and museums or wherever they hole up!

If Equity or my lawyer can't or won't do anything about it, I shall personally stuff that pathetic little lost lamb down Mr. DeWitt's ugly throat!

Karen, in all the years of our friendship, I have never let you go to the ladies' room alone. Now I must.

Isn't it a lovely room? The Cub Room. What a lovely, clever name. Where the elite meet.

It's a great part and a fine play. But not for me anymore. Not for a foursquare, upright, downright, forthright, married lady.

Even Eve. I forgive Eve. There they go. There goes Eve. Eve Evil, little Miss Evil.