Marilyn Monroe Quotes

“I don't mind making jokes, but I don't want to look like one.”
― Marilyn Monroe

“I just want to be wonderful.”
― Marilyn Monroe

“It's all make believe, isn't it?”
― Marilyn Monroe

“When you're young and healthy you can plan on Monday to commit suicide, and by Wednesday you're laughing again.”
― Marilyn Monroe, My Story

“I could never pretend something I didn't feel. I could never make love if I didn't love, and if I loved I could no more hide the fact than change the color of my eyes.”
― Marilyn Monroe, My Story

“If they tell you that she died of sleeping pills you must know that she died of a wasting grief, of a slow bleeding at the soul.”
― Clifford Odets

“That's the way you feel when you're beaten inside. You don't feel angry at those who've beaten you. You just feel ashamed.”
― Marilyn Monroe, My Story

“A wise girl knows her limits, a smart girl knows that she has none.”
― Marilyn Monroe

“Men are always ready to respect anything that bores them.”
― Marilyn Monroe, My Story

“For those who are poor in happiness, each time is a first time; happiness never becomes a habit.”
― Marilyn Monroe, My Story

“You might as well make yourself fly as to make yourself love.”
― Marilyn Monroe, My Story

“Trying to build myself up with the fact that I have done things right that were even good and have had moments that were excellent but the bad is heavier to carry around and feel have no confidence.”
― Marilyn Monroe, Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters

“She was good at playing abstract confusion in the same way that a midget is good at being short.”
― Clive James

“try to enjoy myself when I can - I'll be miserable enough as it is.”
― Marilyn Monroe, Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters

“Erotic: meaning you're "desired."
For madness is seductive, sexy. Female madness.
So long as the female is reasonably young and attractive.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Blonde

“…Heath Ledger once said to me, ‘It’s built you up to knock you down and that’s all it is.”
― Lindsay Lohan , Marilyn: Intimate Exposures

“Her searches after knowledge were arbitrary and without context. It was as if she were shining a small flashlight of curiosity into the dark room of the world.”
― Gloria Steinem, Marilyn

“So I close this long reflection on what I hope is a not-too-quaveringly semi-Semitic note. When I am at home, I will only enter a synagogue for the bar or bat mitzvah of a friend's child, or in order to have a debate with the faithful. (When I was to be wed, I chose a rabbi named Robert Goldburg, an Einsteinian and a Shakespearean and a Spinozist, who had married Arthur Miller to Marilyn Monroe and had a copy of Marilyn’s conversion certificate. He conducted the ceremony in Victor and Annie Navasky's front room, with David Rieff and Steve Wasserman as my best of men.) I wanted to do something to acknowledge, and to knit up, the broken continuity between me and my German-Polish forebears. When I am traveling, I will stop at the shul if it is in a country where Jews are under threat, or dying out, or were once persecuted. This has taken me down queer and sad little side streets in Morocco and Tunisia and Eritrea and India, and in Damascus and Budapest and Prague and Istanbul, more than once to temples that have recently been desecrated by the new breed of racist Islamic gangster. (I have also had quite serious discussions, with Iraqi Kurdish friends, about the possibility of Jews genuinely returning in friendship to the places in northern Iraq from which they were once expelled.) I hate the idea that the dispossession of one people should be held hostage to the victimhood of another, as it is in the Middle East and as it was in Eastern Europe. But I find myself somehow assuming that Jewishness and 'normality' are in some profound way noncompatible. The most gracious thing said to me when I discovered my family secret was by Martin, who after a long evening of ironic reflection said quite simply: 'Hitch, I find that I am a little envious of you.' I choose to think that this proved, once again, his appreciation for the nuances of risk, uncertainty, ambivalence, and ambiguity. These happen to be the very things that 'security' and 'normality,' rather like the fantasy of salvation, cannot purchase.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“I'm pretty, but I'm not beautiful. I sin but I'm not the devil. I'm good, but I'm not an angel”
― Marilyn Monroe

“The new acts' major influences were movies and their curvy queens Brigitte Bardot and Marilyn Monroe. With their big blonde hair, ample breasts, and highly fertile hips, these bombshells inspired women everywhere to exxagerate their own voluptuousness.”
― Dita Von Teese, Burlesque and the Art of the Teese / Fetish and the Art of the Teese

“A l'intérieur de ce corps vivait l'âme d'une intellectuelle et poète dont personne n'avait le soupçon.

Within this body lived the soul of an intellectual and poet, which nobody had suspected.”
― Antonio Tabucchi

“Judas sold his soul for thirty pieces of silver; Faust sold his for some extra years of youth; Marilyn Monroe deserted Jesus Christ for Arthur Miller.”
― Nicholas Samstag, The Uses of Ineptitude or How Not To Want To Do Better

“Women couldn’t identify with her and didn’t support her.”
― Molly Haskell, From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies

“I wanted to be a sex goddess. And you can laugh all you want to. The joke is on me, whether you laugh or not. I wanted to be one -- one of them. They used to laugh at Marilyn when she said she didn't want to be a sex-goddess, she wanted to be a human being. And now they laugh at me when I say, "I don't want to be a human being; I want to be a sex-goddess." That shows you right there that something has changed, doesn't it? Rita, Ava, Lana, Marlene, Marilyn -- I wanted to be one of them. I remember the morning my friend came in and told us that Marilyn had died. And all the boys were stunned, rigid, literally, as they realized what had left us. I mean, if the world couldn't support Marilyn Monroe, then wasn't something desperately wrong? And we spent the rest of the goddamned sixties finding out what it was. We were all living together, me and these three gay boys that adopted me when I ran away, in this loft on East Fifth Street, before it became dropout heaven -- before anyone ever said "dropout" -- way back when "commune" was still a verb? We were all -- old-movie buffs, sex-mad -- you know, the early sixties. And then my friend, this sweet little queen, he came in and he passed out tranquilizers to everyone, and told us all to sit down, and we thought he was just going to tell us there was a Mae West double feature on somewhere -- and he said -- he said -- "Marilyn Monroe died last" -- and all the boys were stunned -- but I -- I felt something sudden and cold in my solar plexus, and I knew then what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to be the next one. I wanted to be the next one to stand radiant and perfected before the race of man, to shed the luminosity of my beloved countenance over the struggles and aspirations of my pitiful subjects. I wanted to give meaning to my own time, to be the unattainable luring love that drives men on, the angle of light, the golden flower, the best of the universe made womankind, the living sacrifice, the end! Shit!”
― Robert Patrick, Kennedy's Children

“It's no good saying "Marilyn, you are a normal person underneath". She is completely convinced that her extraordinary fame exempts her completely. What no one dares to tell her is that her fame springs mainly - but not entirely - from her appearance.”
― Colin Clark, My Week with Marilyn

“I liked the raise I finally received to twelve hundred a week. Even after all the deductions were taken from my salary it remained more money a week than I had once been able to make in six months. I had clothes, fame, money, a future, all the publicity I could dream of. I even had a few friends. And there was always a romance in the air. But instead of being happy over all these fairytale things that had happened to me I grew depressed and finally desperate. My life suddenly seemed as wrong and unbearable to me as it had in the days of my early despairs.”
― Ben Hecht Marilyn Monroe, My Story

“Now that more women are declaring our full humanity - now that we are more likely to be valued for our heads and hearts, not just the bodies that house them - we also wonder: Could we have helped Marilyn survive?”
― Gloria Steinem

“ON MONDAY, AUGUST 6, 1962, WHEN GEORGE ERENGIS, A 20TH Century-Fox security guard reported for work—as he later revealed—“I went into Marilyn’s dressing room on the Fox lot and it had been cleared out. Nothing, not a trace of her had been left. I was shocked. She had earned that studio a fortune but they didn’t waste any time trying to erase her memory.” All her personal effects had been removed, apparently during the night, probably because someone feared there might be something incriminating there that could link her to the Kennedys.”
― Larry Jordan, Silenced: New Evidence In the Mysterious Deaths Of Marilyn Monroe & Dorothy Kilgallen

“MARILYN MONROE WAS A TOP-BILLED ACTRESS FOR A DECADE, AND her films had grossed $200 million by the time of her death—the equivalent of over $2 billion in 2025 dollars.”
― Larry Jordan, Silenced: New Evidence In the Mysterious Deaths Of Marilyn Monroe & Dorothy Kilgallen

“James Patterson is a writer of fiction who is like a factory churning out title after title. His 2025 book on Marilyn is billed as a “true crime story.” Huge swaths of invented dialog and numerous fake scenes prove otherwise. Egregiously, the book promulgates the lies of fraudsters like Bob Slatzer and Jeanne Carmen. Despite packing it with obscure details that will impress readers, Patterson and his co-author Imogen Edwards-Jones have indiscriminately swept into their manuscript many false statements. Such as MM was “taking 20 Nembutals a day, downing the capsules with vodka or Champagne;” J. Edgar Hoover’s “suspicion that she is a Communist is confirmed;” there was “a trail of white pills scattered on the carpet” of her bedroom and “15 bottles of...knockout drops.” The authors use a quote from a manuscript by Ben Hecht, which has Marilyn supposedly saying, “Yes, there was something special about me, and I knew what it was. I was the kind of girl they found dead in a hall bedroom with an empty bottle of sleeping pills in her hand.” But MM had her lawyer threaten Hecht if his manuscript—which was “not accurate...not true”—wasn’t withdrawn. Patterson, who is reportedly worth $800 million, will get his massive book sales, but at the expense of Marilyn’s reputation.”
― Larry Jordan, Silenced: New Evidence In the Mysterious Deaths Of Marilyn Monroe & Dorothy Kilgallen