Top 36 Garbo Quotes & Sayings

I think familiarity breeds contempt. I mean, we'll never get another Greta Garbo will we? Someone would go in with a camera Sellotaped to the bottom of a tray trying to get film of her with no make-up on.

The only actress they didn't test was Garbo. Must have been her accent.

The face of Garbo is an Idea, that of Hepburn an Event.

Greta Garbo: A deer in the body of a woman, living resentfully in the Hollywood zoo.

The old-fashioned idea that the simple piling up of experiences, one on top of another, can make you an artist, is, of course, so much rubbish. If acting were just a matter of experience, then any busy harlot could make Garbo's Camille pale.

Ah, Marilyn, Hollywood's Joan of Arc, our Ultimate Sacrificial Lamb. Well, let me tell you, she was mean, terribly mean. The meanest woman I have ever known in this town. I am appalled by this Marilyn Monroe cult. Perhaps it's getting to be an act of courage to say the truth about her. Well, let me be courageous. I have never met anyone as utterly mean as Marilyn Monroe. Nor as utterly fabulous on the screen, and that includes Garbo.

Who can copy Garbo?

Once, I was a bigger star than Greta Garbo.

It's better to fade away like an old soldier than to burn out. I don't appreciate worship of dead Sid Vicious or of dead James Dean or of dead John Wayne. It's the same thing. Making Sid Vicious a hero, Jim Morrison - it's garbage to me. I worship the people who survive. Gloria Swanson, Greta Garbo.

The mystery surrounding Garbo was as thick as a London fog.

I think it's mainly when I need inspiration I look at the old pictures. I don't find it as much in the new stuff. I love Carole Lombard. I think she's wonderful. Gloria Grahame was really great. Garbo. Dietrich. People knew how to create an illusion. Now everything is very realistic and straightforward. Everyone's grunge.

Garbo still belongs to that moment in cinema when capturing the human face still plunged audiences into the deepest ecstasy, when one literally lost oneself in a human image as one would in a philtre, when the face represented a kind of absolute state of the flesh, which could be neither reached nor renounced.

Very few people rise that high, to be a performer known as only one name. Caruso... Valentino... Hitchcock... Garbo.

I cry watching 'Camille' with Greta Garbo. I have to say that - while it might sound weird - it will be weird, but there is one movie I always laugh in, and at the end of the movie, I always cry, and I saw it, like, 10 times. It's 'Step Brothers.'

It's one of the most beautiful memories of my life. Not everyone has a chance to meet Greta Garbo! I was so in awe of her that I recently had my assistant search online for her film Queen Christina [1933]. I cherish that rare DVD like a precious keepsake now.

I mean, the actors that I admired were Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, an actress named Barbara Harris. And Greta Garbo. They were great actors.

Why haven't I got a husband and children?" mused Greta Garbo to the Dutchess of Windsor, "I never met a man I could marry.

You can compare me with Greta Garbo. I have big feet, too.

I'm fascinated by Greta Garbo. My cat's named Greta, and I have a framed photograph of her from 1949.

I was a big fan of Greta Garbo and that era of movies, so I dreamt watching those movies.

I think movies also played a part in my interest in fashion. I've also always been hooked on the movies. From my early teens on, I always had my favorite movie stars who I admired, like Carole Lombard and Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich, and the men in my life who I loved, like Gary Cooper.

Except physically, we know little more about Garbo than we know about Shakespeare.

She's got Greta Garbo's standoff sighs, she's got Bette Davis eyes.

There was a saying around MGM: "Norma Shearer got the productions, Greta Garbo supplied the art, and Joan Crawford made the money to pay for both".

What, when drunk, one sees in other women, one sees in Garbo sober.

In the old days, a star was someone up there - you know, Greta Garbo - but a telly star was somebody you could approach.

As a language, Garbo's singularity was of the order of the concept, that of Audrey Hepburn is of the order of the substance; the face of Garbo is an Idea, that of Hepburn, an Event.

There is no Garbo! There is no Dietrich! There is only Louise Brooks!

My perfect day would be to go on a picnic up Mt. Wilson with Christopher Isherwood, Greta Garbo, Aldous Huxley, and Bertrand Russell.

I could be the Greta Garbo of comedy, very secluded, but Garbo had a man who was beyond rich to support her.

I've always had a thing for old movies, old Hollywood. I've always just loved watching Marilyn Monroe and Greta Garbo. In all of those old movies from the '40s and '50s, women put themselves together so well, with a little bit of drama and elegance. That was fascinating to me growing up.

There's something I call telegenekicity, and it's not about just models. Of course, I can reference Iman, Tatiana Patitz, Kelly Emberg, Bonnie Berman - I go all the way back - but I think that you develop an eye to register iconic images - like Greta Garbo and Elizabeth Taylor.

After so many drive-in waitresses becoming movie stars, there has been this real drought, when along come class; somebody who actually went to school, can spell, maybe even plays the piano. She may be a wispy, thin little thing, but when you see that girl, you know you're really in the presence of something. In that league there's only ever been Garbo, and the other Hepburn, and maybe Bergman. It's a rare quality, but boy, do you know when you've found it.

I think it is quite wrong to photograph, for example, Garbo, if she doesn't want to be photographed. Now I would have loved to photograph her, but she obviously didn't want to be photographed so I didn't follow it up. Then somebody will photograph her walking down the street because she has to walk down the street, and I mind that sort of intrusion. I think this is horrible.

"I want to be a lawn." Greta Garbo.

The ending shot of 'Queen Christina' with Greta Garbo is amazing. She's at the head of the ship, and she's been through so much, and the camera gets so close to her face. That really sticks out for me.