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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Birdie, you don't like Eve, do you?"

"You looking for an answer or an argument?"

"An answer."

"No."

"Why not?"

"Now you want an argument."

"So many people know me. I wish I did. I wish someone would tell me about me."

"You're Margo, just Margo."

"And what is that, besides something spelled out in light bulbs? 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."

"You bought the new girdles a size smaller, I can feel it."

"Something maybe grew a size larger."

"When we get home you're going to get into one of those girdles and act for two and a half hours."

"I couldn't get into the girdle in two and a half hours."

"As it happens, there are particular aspects of my life to which I would like to maintain sole and exclusive rights and privileges."

"For instance what?"

"For instance: you!"

"There's a message from the bartender. Does Miss Channing know she ordered domestic gin by mistake?"

"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!"

"How about calling it a night?"

"And you pose as a playwright? A situation pregnant with possibilities and all you can think of is everybody go to sleep."

"This is my cue to take you in my arms and reassure you. But I'm not going to - I'm too mad."

"Guilty!"

"Darling, there are certain characteristics for which you are famous, on stage and off. I love you for some of them, in spite of others. I haven't let those become too important."

"They're part of your equipment for getting along in what is laughingly called our environment. You have to keep your teeth sharp - all right - but I will not have you sharpen them on me, or on Eve!"

"What about her teeth? What about her fangs?"

"She hasn't cut them yet, and you know it!"

"Cut! Print it! What happens in the next reel? Do I get dragged off screaming to the snake pits?"

"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?"

"Usually at the point where she has to rewrite and rethink them, to keep the audience from leaving the theatre!"

"We have to go to City Hall for the marriage license and blood test."

"I'd marry you if it turned out you had no blood at all."

"Outside of a beehive, Margo, your behavior would not be considered either queenly or motherly."

"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?"

"Thank you, Eve. I'd like a martini, very dry."

"I'll get it. What'll you have?"

"A milkshake?"

"A martini, very dry, please."

"If there's nothing else, there's applause. I've listened backstage to people applaud. It's like - like waves of love coming over the footlights and wrapping you up."

"Imagine, to know every night that different hundreds of people love you. They smile, their eyes shine, you've pleased them. They want you. You belong. Just that alone is worth anything."

"When you're a secretary in a brewery, it's pretty hard to make-believe you're anything else. Everything is beer."

"I've seen every performance. I'd like anything Miss Channing played in. I think that part of Miss Channing's greatness lies in her ability to pick the best plays."

"But somehow, acting and make-believe began to fill up my life more and more. It got so I couldn't tell the real from the unreal. Except that the unreal seemed more real to me."

"And there were theaters in San Francisco. And then one night, Margo Channing came to play in Remembrance and I went to see it. Well, here I am."

"I'll never forget this night as long as I live, and I'll never forget you for making it possible."

"I won't play tonight. I couldn't, not possibly. I couldn't go on."

"Lloyd Richards. He's going to leave Karen. We're going to be married. Lloyd loves me, I love him. I'm in love with Lloyd."

"Oh Addison, won't it be just perfect? Lloyd and I - there's no telling how far we can go. He'll write great plays for me, I'll make them great."

"I will regard this great honor not so much as an award for what I have achieved, but a standard to hold against what I have yet to accomplish."

"It's not modesty. I just don't try to kid myself."

"To those of you who do not read, attend the theater, listen to unsponsored radio programs, or know anything of the world in which you live, it is perhaps necessary to introduce myself. My name is Addison DeWitt."

"My native habitat is the theater. In it, I toil not, neither do I spin. I am a critic and commentator. I am essential to the theater."

"Margo Channing is a star of the theater. She made her first stage appearance at the age of four in Midsummer Night's Dream. She played a fairy and entered, quite unexpectedly, stark naked. She has been a star ever since."

"Margo is a great star, a true star. She never was or will be anything less or anything else."

"That I should want you at all, suddenly strikes me as the height of improbability. But that, in itself, is probably the reason. You're an improbable person, Eve, and so am I. We have that in common."

"Also, our contempt for humanity and inability to love, and be loved, insatiable ambition, and talent. We deserve each other."

"What do you take me for?"

"I don't know that I'd take you for anything."

"Is it possible, even conceivable, that you've confused me with that gang of backward children you play tricks on, that you have the same contempt for me as you have for them?"

"I'm sure you mean something by that, Addison, but I don't know what."

"Look closely, Eve. It's time you did. I am Addison DeWitt. I am nobody's fool, least of all yours."

"I never intended you to be."

"Yes you did, and you still do."

"I still don't know what you're getting at, but right now I want to take my nap. It's important..."

"It's important right now that we talk, killer to killer."

"Champion to champion."

"Not with me, you're no champion. You're stepping way up in class."

"Addison, will you please say what you have to say, plainly and distinctly, and then get out, so I can take my nap?"

"Very well - plainly and distinctly - though I consider it unnecessary because you know as well as I do what I'm going to say: Lloyd may leave Karen, but he will not leave Karen for you."

"What do you mean by that?"

"More plainly and more distinctly: I have not come to New Haven to see the play, discuss your dreams, or pull the ivy from the walls of Yale. I have come here to tell you that you will not marry Lloyd, or anyone else for that matter, because I will not permit it."

"What have you got to do with it?"

"Everything, because after tonight, you will belong to me."

"Belong? To you? I can't believe my ears!"

"What a dull cliché."

"Belong to you - why, that sounds medieval, something out of an old melodrama!"

"So does the history of the world for the past twenty years."

"Now, remember, as long as you live, never to laugh at me - at anything or anyone else, but never at me."

"Get out!"

"You're too short for that gesture. Besides, it went out with Mrs. Fiske."

"Oh, waiter!"

"That is not a waiter, my dear, that is a butler."

"Well, I can't yell 'Oh butler!' can I? Maybe somebody's name is Butler."

"You have a point. An idiotic one, but a point."

"I don't want to make trouble. All I want is a drink."

"Leave it to me. I'll get you one."

"Well done! I can see your career rise in the east like the sun."

"Tell me, Phoebe, do you want someday to have an award like that of your own?"

"More than anything else in the world."

"Then you must ask Miss Harrington how to get one. Miss Harrington knows all about it."

"You could sleep now, couldn't you?"

"Why not?"

"The mark of a true killer: sleep tight, rest easy, and come out fighting."

"What a story! Everything but the bloodhounds snappin' at her rear end."