Quotes from Elaine Dundy

Acting doesn't bring anything to a text. On the contrary, it detracts from it.

I find I always have to write something on a steamed mirror.

I always expect people to behave much better than I do. When they actually behave worse, I am frankly incredulous.

That's my answer to the question what is your strongest emotion, if you ever want to ask me: Curiosity, old bean. Curiosity every time.

It's amazing how right you can be about a person you don't know; it's only the people you do know who confuse you.

The world is wide, wide, wide, and I am young, young, young, and we're all going to live forever!

It's difficult to explain, but I just somehow feel that I never really *have* lived; that I never really will live--exist or whatever--in the sense that other people do. It drives me crazy. I was terribly aware of it all those nights waiting for you in the Ritz bar looking around at what seemed to be real grown-up lives. I just find everybody else's life surrounded by plate glass. I mean I'd like to break through it just once and actually touch one.

Now here's the heavy irony. So I went back to New York to become a librarian. To actually seek out this thing I've been fleeing all my life. and (here it comes): a librarian is just not that easy to become...Apparently there's a whole filing system and annotating system and stamping system and God knows what you have to learn before you qualify.

The vehemence of my moral indignation surprised me. Was I beginning to have standards and principles, and, oh dear, scruples? What were they, and what would I do with them, and how much were they going to get in my way?

W]hat is always overlooked is that although the poor want to be rich, it does not follow that they either like the rich or that they in any way want to emulate their characters which, in fact, they despise. Both the poor and the rich have always found precisely the same grounds on which to complain about each other. Each feels the other has no manners, is disloyal, corrupt, insensitive - and has never put in an honest day's work in its life.

What's the use of remembering anything? If it was unpleasant it was unpleasant and if it was pleasant it's over.

I don't always understand other people's motives. I will repeat that for my own benefit, if you don't mind. I don't always understand other people's motives.

It's just that I know the world is so wide and full of people and exciting things that I just go crazy every day stuck in these institutions. I mean if I don't get started soon, how will I get the chance to sharpen my wits? It takes lots of training. You have to start very young.

Frequently, walking down the streets in Paris alone, I've suddenly come upon myself in a store window grinning foolishly away at the thought that no one in the world knew where I was at just that moment.

Oh, Teddy, darling, thank you, thank you, for restoring my cynicism. I was too young to lose it.

I love you. If you hadn't existed I would have had to invent you.

T]he question actors most often get asked is how they can bear saying the same things over and over again night after night, but God knows the answer to that is, don't we all anyway; might as well get paid for it.

I had no technique for dealing with him: only an overpowering, unnerving, irrational, chemical desire to be with him.

That's the story of my life. Someone's behavior strikes me as a bit odd and the next thing I know all hell breaks loose.

I only did it,' I said, 'now this is going to be the truth, Teddy, I only did it because it seemed to be the glamorous thing to do at the time. It was my ideal of glamour.

I've never wanted to meet anyone I've been introduced to. I want to meet all the other people.

I felt my attention wandering off. It generally does at the phrase "mere child.

A rowdy bunch on the whole, they were most of them so violently individualistic as to be practically interchangeable.

He tried to kiss me. One of the few things that had impressed me in college was a Southern girl's account o how she avoided being kissed on the doorstep of her house once by wearing a flower in her hair and sticking it in her mouth when she said good night. Only I had no flower.