Sunset Blvd. Quotes
Now back to the typewritters by way of Washington Square.
Joe Gillis
The stars are ageless, aren't they?
Norma Desmond
Without me, there wouldn't be any Paramount studio.
Norma Desmond
Betty Schaefer: Where have you been keeping yourself? I've got the most wonderful news for you.
Joe Gillis: I haven't been keeping myself at all, lately.
Norma Desmond: You're a writer, you said.
Joe Gillis: Why?
Norma Desmond: Are you or aren't you?
Joe Gillis: That's what it says on my Guild card.
Norma Desmond: And you have written pictures, haven't you?
Joe Gillis: I sure have. Want a list of my credits?
Norma Desmond: I want to ask you something. Come in here.
Joe Gillis: Last one I wrote was about Okies in the Dust Bowl. You'd never know because when it reached the screen, the whole thing played on a torpedo boat.
Betty Schaefer: Oh, the old familiar story. You help a timid little soul cross a crowded street, she turns out to be a multimillionaire and leaves you all her money.
Joe Gillis: That's the trouble with you readers, you know all the plots.
Jonesy! Hey, Jonesy!
Norma Desmond
Norma, you're a woman of 50, now grow up. There's nothing tragic about being 50, not unless you try to be 25.
Joe Gillis
I'll be up there again, so help me!
Norma Desmond
Joe Gillis: [who has just has a visit from two men trying to repossess his car]
[narrating]
Joe Gillis: I was way ahead of the finance company. I knew they'd be becoming around and I wasn't taking any chances. So I kept it across the street in a parking lot behind Rudy's shoeshine parlour. Rudy never asked any questions about your finances... he'd just look at your heels and know the score.
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Betty Schaefer: Perhaps the reason I hated "Bases Loaded" is that I knew your name. I'd always heard you had some talent.
Joe Gillis: That was last year. This year I'm trying to earn a living.
[narrating] Come think of it, the whole place seemed to have been stricken with the kind of creeping paralysis... out of beat with the rest of the world... crumbling apart in slow motion. There was a tennis court... or rather the ghost of a tennis court... with faded markings and a sagging net... And of course she had a pool. Who didn't then? Mabel Norman and John Gilbert must swum in it ten thousand midnights ago... It was empty now. Or was it?
Joe Gillis
[cut to close-up of rats]
We don't need two cars, we have a car. Not one of those cheap new things made of chromium and spit, an Isotta-Fraschini. Have you ever heard of Isotta-Fraschini? All handmade. Cost me $28,000.
Norma Desmond
