Elaine Dundy Quotes

18 Sourced Quotes

Oh, Teddy, darling, thank you, thank you, for restoring my cynicism. I was too young to lose it.

Elaine Dundy
I've never wanted to meet anyone I've been introduced to. I want to meet all the other people.

Elaine Dundy
I don't always understand other people's motives. I will repeat that for my own benefit, if you don't mind. I don't always understand other people's motives.

Elaine Dundy
That's my answer to the question what is your strongest emotion, if you ever want to ask me: Curiosity, old bean. Curiosity every time.

Elaine Dundy
A rowdy bunch on the whole, they were most of them so violently individualistic as to be practically interchangeable.

Elaine Dundy
I was merely a disinterested spectator at the Banquet of Life.

Elaine Dundy
I hate champagne more than anything in the world next to Seven-Up.

Elaine Dundy
I'd always prided myself on how unlike my books were from each other in settings and subject matter. But not until late in my career did I realize that a single thread ran through them, that I'd used the same strategy to catch the reader's attention. It is the old Western movie gimmick: A Stranger Comes to Town. I am that Stranger. Together with the reader I will discover what's going on in that town whether it be Paris, London, New York, Sydney, Tupelo, Ferriday — or in a women's federal prison. And eventually we will make sense of it.

Elaine Dundy
Being with Hemingway meant joining in his elaborate game playing as a necessary mark of respect. Tennessee asked only that you be colorful and that you be honest.
Looking back I still find the 50s the most exhilarating decade I've lived through. The only mistake I made then was in thinking it would go on forever. I keep reading it was all Dull Conformity and I wonder where those people were living. Not on my planet. The fact that we had won World War 2 and that we were alive led to a post-war cultural explosion.

Elaine Dundy
At some point in my life I realized I knew only celebrities, I didn't know any real people. I think it was a master stroke of Fate that in researching the greatest celebrity of them all, I would at last be meeting real people, finding them more extraordinary than celebrities; fascinated by them all and enjoying enduring friendships with some.

Elaine Dundy
It was one of those nights when the air is blood-temperature and it's impossible to tell where you leave off and it begins.

Elaine Dundy
The vehemence of my moral indignation surprised me. Was I beginning to have standards and principles, and, oh dear, scruples? What were they, and what would I do with them, and how much were they going to get in my way?

Elaine Dundy
What is always overlooked is that although the poor want to be rich, it does not follow that they either like the rich or that they in any way want to emulate their characters which, in fact, they despise. Both the poor and the rich have always found precisely the same grounds on which to complain about each other. Each feels the other has no manners, is disloyal, corrupt, insensitive — and has never put in an honest day's work in its life.

Elaine Dundy
I mean, the question actors most often get asked is how they can bear saying the same things over and over again night after night, but God knows the answer to that is, don't we all anyway; might as well get paid for it.

Elaine Dundy
The world is wide, wide, wide, and I am young, young, young, and we're all going to live forever!

Elaine Dundy
I always expect people to behave much better than I do. When they actually behave worse, I am frankly incredulous.

Elaine Dundy
I find I always have to write something on a steamed mirror.

Elaine Dundy
What's the use of remembering anything? If it was unpleasant it was unpleasant and if it was pleasant it's over.

Elaine Dundy