All About Eve (1950) · 78 quotes
Most-quoted character in All About Eve (1950): in 27 of its 78 quotes
Most scenes with: Bill (6), Karen Richards (4), Addison DeWitt (3)
Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy night.
Note: ranked #9 in the American Film Institute's list of the top 100 movie quotations in American cinema.
Margo Channing Margo Channing
Autograph fiends, they're not people. Those are little beasts that run around in packs like coyotes...They're nobody's fans. They're juvenile delinquent, they're mental defective, and nobody's audience. They never see a play or a movie even. They're never indoors long enough.
Margo Channing Suddenly, I've developed a big protective feeling for her. A lamb loose in our big stone jungle.
Margo Channing 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.
Margo Channing Lloyd, I am not twenty-ish. I am not thirty-ish. Three months ago, I was forty years old. Forty. Four oh - That slipped out. I hadn't quite made up my mind to admit it. Now I suddenly feel as if I've taken all my clothes off.
Margo Channing Bill's thirty-two. He looks thirty-two. He looked it five years ago, he'll look it twenty years from now. I hate men.
Margo Channing This is my house, not a theater. In my house, you're a guest, not a director.
Margo Channing And so my hat, which has lo these many seasons become more firmly rooted about my ears, is lifted to Miss Harrington. I am once more available for dancing in the streets and shouting from the housetops...Miss Harrington had much to tell and these columns shall report her faithfully about the lamentable practice in our theater of permitting, shall we say, mature actresses to continue playing roles requiring a youth and vigor which they retain but a dim memory...about the understandable reluctance on the part of our entrenched first ladies of the stage to encourage, shall we say, younger actresses about Miss Harrington's own long and supported struggle for opportunity.
Margo Channing The little witch must have sent out Indian runners, snatching critics out of bars and steam rooms and museums, or wherever they holed up. Well, she won't get away with it, nor will Addison De Witt and his poison pen. If Equity or my lawyer can't or won't do anything about it, I shall personally stuff that pathetic little lost lamb down Mr. De Witt's ugly throat.
Margo Channing Never have I been so happy...I'm forgiving tonight, even Eve, I forgive Eve...Do you know what I'm going to be?...A married lady...No more make believe off stage or on. Remember, Lloyd? I mean it now...I don't want to play Cora...It isn't the part. It's a great part in a fine play. But not for me anymore. Not for a four-square, upright, downright, forthright married lady...It means I finally got a life to live. I don't have to play parts I'm too old for, just because I've got nothing to do with my nights.
Margo Channing 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.
Margo Channing As it happens, there are particular aspects of my life to which I would like to maintain sole and exclusive rights and privileges.
What a story! Everything but the bloodhounds snappin' at her rear end.
Margo There are some human experiences, Birdie, that do not take place in a vaudeville house - and that even a fifth-rate vaudevillian should understand and respect!
Margo Bill, don't get stuck on some glamour-puss.
I'll try.
Margo You're not much of a bargain, you know. You're conceited, and thoughtless and messy.
Well, everybody can't be Gregory Peck.
Margo You're a set-up for some gorgeous, wide-eyed young bait.
How childish are you going to get before you stop it?
Margo I don't want to be childish. I'll settle for a few years.
Then cut that out right now.
Margo Am I going to lose you, Bill? Am I?
As of this moment, you're six years old.
Margo You bought the new girdle a size smaller. I can feel it.
Somethin' maybe grew a size larger.
We started talking. She wanted to know about Hollywood. She seemed so interested.
Margo She's a girl of so many interests.
A pretty rare quality these days.
Margo A girl of so many rare qualities.
So she seems.
Margo So you've pointed out so often. So many qualities so often. Her loyalty, efficiency, devotion, warmth, and affection, and so young. So young and so fair.
I can't believe you're making this up...Of course it's funny. This is all too laughable to be anything else. You know what I feel about this age obsession of yours. And now this ridiculous attempt to whip yourself up into a jealous froth because I spent ten minutes with a stage-struck kid.
Margo Twenty.
Thirty minutes, forty minutes, what of it?
Margo Stage-struck kid! She's a young lady of quality. And I'll have you know I'm fed up with both the young lady and her qualities. Studying me as if I were a play or a blueprint, how I walk, talk, think, act, sleep.
Now, how can you take offense at a kid trying in every way to be as much like her ideal as possible?
Margo Stop calling her a kid. 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?
Margo For instance you.
This is my cue to take you in my arms and reassure you. But I'm not going to. I'm too mad...
Margo Guilty.
...Mad! Darling, there are certain characteristics for which you are famous onstage 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.
Margo What about her teeth? What about her fangs?
She hasn't cut them yet, and you know it! So when you start judging an idealistic, dreamy-eyed kid by the barroom benzedrine standards of this megalomaniac society, I won't have it. Eve Harrington has never by a word, a look, or a suggestion indicated anything to me but her adoration for you and her happiness at our being in love. And to intimate anything else doesn't spell jealousy to me. It spells out paranoiac insecurity that you should be ashamed of.
Margo Cut! Brilliant! What happens in the next reel? Do I get dragged off screaming to the snake pit?
Margo, nothing you've ever done has made me as happy as your taking Eve in.
Margo I'm so happy you're happy.
Many of your guests have been wondering when they may be permitted to view the body. Where has it been laid out?
Margo It hasn't been laid out. We haven't finished with the embalming. As a matter of fact, you're looking at it - the remains of Margo Channing, sitting up. It is my last wish to be buried sitting up.
Wouldn't it be more natural for you to be taking a bow?
Margo And please stop acting as if I were the Queen-Mother.
I'm sorry, I didn't...
Outside of a beehive, Margo, your behavior would hardly be considered either queenly or motherly.
Margo You're in a beehive, pal. Didn't you know? We're all busy little bees, full of stings, making honey, day and night. [To Eve] Aren't we, honey?
Margo, really.
Margo Please don't play governess, Karen. I haven't your unyielding good taste. I wish I could have gone to Radcliffe too, but father wouldn't hear of it. He needed help behind the notions counter. I'm being rude now, aren't I? Or should I say, ain't I?
You're maudlin and full of self-pity. You're magnificent.
How about calling it a night?
Margo And you, posing as a playwright, a situation pregnant with possibilities and all you can think of is everybody go to sleep.
Margo You be host. It's your party. Happy birthday, welcome home. And we who are about to die...
Too bad, we're gonna miss the third act. They're gonna play it off stage.
It wasn't a reading. It was a performance. Brilliant, vivid, something made of music and fire.
Margo How nice.
In time, she'll be what you are.
Margo A mass of music and fire.
Margo All playwrights should be dead for three hundred years!
That would solve none of their problems, because actresses never die. The stars never die and never change.
Margo You may change this star any time you want for a new and fresh and exciting one, fully equipped with fire and music. Anytime you want, starting with tonight's performance....
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?
Margo Usually at the point when she has to rewrite and rethink them to keep the audience from leaving the theater.
It's about time the piano realized it has not written the concerto!
Margo And you, I take it, are the Paderewski who plays his concerto on me, the piano?
The gong rang, the fight's over. Calm down.
Margo I will not calm down.
Don't calm down.
Margo You're being terribly tolerant, aren't you?
I'm trying terribly hard.
Margo But you needn't be. I will not be tolerated and I will not be plotted against.
Here we go.
Margo Such nonsense. What do you all take me for - Little Nell from the country? Been my understudy for over a week without my knowing it, carefully hidden no doubt.
I am sick and tired of these paranoiac outbursts...For the last time, I'll tell it to you. You've got to stop hurting yourself and me and the two of us by these paranoiac tantrums...You're a beautiful and an intelligent woman, and a great actress. A great actress at the peak of her career. You have every reason for happiness...but due to some strange, uncontrollable, unconscious drive, you permit the slightest action of...a kid like Eve to turn you into an hysterical, screaming harpy. Now, once and for all, stop it!
Margo 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.
Margo So many people know me. I wish I did. I wish someone would tell me about me.
You're Margo, just Margo.
Margo And what is that besides something spelled out in lightbulbs, I mean, 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.
Margo Bill's in love with Margo Channing. He's fought with her, worked with her, and loved her. But ten years from now, Margo Channing will have ceased to exist. And what's left will be - what?
Margo, Bill is all of eight years younger than you.
Margo Those years stretch as the years go on. I've seen it happen too often.
Not to you, not to Bill.
Margo Isn't that what they always say?...About Eve, I've acted pretty disgracefully toward her too.
Well,...
Margo Don't fumble for excuses, not here and now with my hair down. At best, let's say I've been oversensitive to her...to the fact that she's so young, so feminine and so helpless, too so many things I want to be for Bill. 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. There'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 is 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 - a book full of clippings, but you're not a woman. Slow curtain. The End.
The so-called art of acting is not one for which I have a particularly-high regard...But you may quote me as follows. Quote: 'Tonight, Miss Margo Channing gave a performance in your cockamamie play the like of which I have never seen before and expect rarely to see again.' Unquote....I shall propose the toast. Without wit. With all my heart. To Margo. To my bride-to-be.
Margo Glory, Hallelujah.
Margo Encore du champagne.
Waiter More champagne, Miss Channing?
Margo That's what I said, bub.
