- [when told by a reporter that she had a large gay following] I couldn't care less. I sing to people!
- How strange when an illusion dies. It's as though you've lost a child.
- Well, we have a whole new year ahead of us. And wouldn't it be wonderful if we could all be a little more gentle with each other, and a little more loving, have a little more empathy, and maybe - next year at this time - we'd like each other a little more.
- [MGM] had us working days and nights on end. They'd give us pep-up pills to keep us on our feet long after we were exhausted. Then they'd take us to the studio hospital and knock us cold with sleeping pills . . . Then after four hours they'd wake us up and give us the pep-up pills again so we could work another 72 hours in a row. I started to feel like a wind-up toy from FAO Schwarz.
- Hollywood is a strange place if you're in trouble. Everybody thinks it's contagious.
- [on her sadistic stage mother] She was the real Wicked Witch of the West.
- I was born at the age of 12 on a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lot.
- I wanted to believe and I tried my damndest to believe in the rainbow that I tried to get over and couldn't. So what? Lots of people can't...
- As for my feelings toward "Over the Rainbow", it's become part of my life. It is so symbolic of all my dreams and wishes that I'm sure that's why people sometimes get tears in their eyes when they hear it.
- In the silence of night I have often wished for just a few words of love from one man, rather than the applause of thousands of people.
- My mother had a marvelous talent for mishandling money - mine. When I was put under stock contract at Metro and had a steady income for the first time, we lived in a four-unit apartment building. I suggested to Mother that we buy it as an investment and rent the other three apartments. She hit me in the mouth and invested the money in a nickel mine in Needles, California, that has never been found. We never got a nickel back.
- Some of the [midget] men used to tease me while we were making The Wizard of Oz (1939). They used to sneak under my dress! I told them if they ever went under there - and I found out about it - they were in big trouble!
- [on daughter Liza Minnelli] I think she decided to go into show business when she was an embryo, she kicked so much.
- [during her short stint as a cast member of Valley of the Dolls (1967)] The stage hands hadn't even built the set yet, and the press had me walking off it!
- When you have lived the life I've lived, when you've loved and suffered, and been madly happy and desperately sad -- well, that's when you realize you'll never be able to set it all down. Maybe you'd rather die first.
- From the time I was thirteen, there was a constant struggle between MGM and me - whether or not to eat, how much to eat, what to eat. I remember this more vividly than anything else about my childhood.
- I'm a woman who wants to reach out and take 40 million people in her arms.
- I have the unfortunate habit of not being able to have an affair with a man without being in love with him.
- If I am a legend, then why am I so lonely?
- [of the MGM Studio school] The teacher, I think, was named Ma Barker.
- Always be a first-rate version of yourself, instead of a second-rate version of somebody else.
- I can live without money, but I cannot live without love.
- Behind every cloud is another cloud.
- Whenever we'd do that little dance up the Yellow Brick Road, I was supposed to be with them - and they'd shut me out! They would close in, the three of them, and I would be in back of them, dancing. So director Victor Fleming - who was a darling man, always up on a boom - would say, 'Hold it! You three dirty hams! Let that little girl in there! Let her in there!'
- You think you can make me sing? Do you think you can? You can get me there, sure, but can you make me sing? I sing for myself. I sing when I want to, whenever I want to, just for me. I sing for my own pleasure, whenever I want. Do you understand that?
- [on the 27 takes over 3 days that it took to film 'The Man That Got Away'] I would try to make the electricians and the cameramen and the others react to the song. Only when they had shown the emotion [it] was supposed to evoke did I feel I had reached them.
- [on the behavior of the actors playing the Munchkins during the filming of The Wizard of Oz (1939)] They were drunks. They got smashed every night and the police used to scoop them up in butterfly nets.
- I've always taken The Wizard of Oz (1939) very seriously, you know. I believe in the idea of the rainbow. And I've spent my entire life trying to get over it.
- If you have to be in a soap opera, try not to get the worst role.
- Every time the camera rolls, I think to myself 'Maybe this is the time they're going to catch me.'
- [told at a party in Beverley Hills that Princess Margaret wanted her to sing] Tell her I'll sing if she christens a ship first.
- I'm always being painted a more tragic figure than I am. Actually, I get awfully bored with myself as a tragic figure.
- I've heard how 'difficult' it is to be with Judy Garland, but do you know how difficult it is to BE Judy Garland? And for ME to live with me? I've had to do it - and what more unkind life can you think of than the one I've lived?
- Ever since The Wizard of Oz I've been accused of being twelve years old. You should see some of the disappointed looks I get, when people lay eyes on me in person. They expect someone in gingham, with braids, to come out singing 'Over the Rainbow.' And out I come, instead. I think some of them are pretty angry with me, too, for not wearing braids, and not dressing like Dorothy, and not being eleven or twelve.
- Not many of us have the names or identities we were born with. I don't associate Frances Gumm with me-she's a girl I can read about the way other people do. I, Judy Garland, was born when I was twelve years old. When a studio puts you under contract, its publicity department starts turning out news copy about you that you read with astonishment. You think, can this be me they're talking about? They don't really manufacture untruths, but they play up whatever makes interesting reading. Then a columnist adds his own little embellishments and another adds to that until there's a whole body of so called 'facts' floating around. Almost like another you-that simply isn't real. It isn't a lie, but it isn't real, either.
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