All About Eve
All About Eve

Margo: Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy night!

All About Eve
All About Eve

Margo: 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.

All About Eve
All About Eve

Margo: 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.

All About Eve
All About Eve

Margo: 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.

All About Eve
All About Eve

Margo: Birdie, you don't like Eve, do you?
Birdie: You looking for an answer or an argument?
Margo: An answer.
Birdie: No.
Margo: Why not?
Birdie: Now you want an argument.

All About Eve
All About Eve

Margo: So many people know me. I wish I did. I wish someone would tell me about me.
Karen: You're Margo, just Margo.
Margo: And what is that, besides something spelled out in light bulbs, 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.

All About Eve
All About Eve

Margo: Lloyd, honey, be a playwright with guts. Write me one about a nice normal woman who just shoots her husband.

All About Eve
All About Eve

[a butler passes by]
Miss Casswell: Oh, waiter!
Addison DeWitt: That is not a waiter, my dear, that is a butler.
Miss Casswell: Well, I can't yell "Oh butler!" can I? Maybe somebody's name is Butler.
Addison DeWitt: You have a point. An idiotic one, but a point.
Miss Casswell: I

don't want to make trouble. All I want is a drink.
Max Fabian: Leave it to me. I'll get you one.
Miss Casswell: Thank you, Mr. Fabian.
Addison DeWitt: Well done! I can see your career rise in the east like the sun.

All About Eve
All About Eve

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

All About Eve
All About Eve

Addison DeWitt: [voiceover] 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.

All About Eve
All About Eve

Addison DeWitt: 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.

All About Eve
All About Eve

Lloyd Richards: 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 where she has to rewrite and rethink them, to keep the audience from leaving the theatre!

All About Eve
All About Eve

Lloyd Richards: That bitter cynicism of yours is something you've acquired since you left Radcliffe!
Karen: The cynicism you refer to, I acquired the day I discovered I was different from little boys!

All About Eve
All About Eve

Addison DeWitt: [voiceover intro] 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.

All About Eve
All About Eve

Bill Sampson: The theatre. The theatre. What book of rules say the theatre exists only within some ugly buildings crowded into one square mile of New York City? Or London? Paris or Vienna? Listen, Junior, and learn. Do you wanna know what the theatre is? A flea circus. Also opera. Also rodeos, carnivals, ballets, Indian tribal dances, Punch and Judy, a one-man band, all theatre.

Wherever there's magic and make-believe and an audience, there's theatre. Donald Duck, Ibsen and The Lone Ranger. Sarah Bernhardt and Poodles Hanneford. Lunt and Fontanne, Betty Grable. Rex the Wild Horse, Eleonora Duse, all theatre. You don't understand them all. You don't like them all. Why should you? The theatre's for everybody, you included, but not exclusively. So, don't approve or

disapprove. It may not be your theatre, but it's theatre for somebody, somewhere.

All About Eve
All About Eve

Addison DeWitt: And what's your name?
Phoebe: Phoebe.
Addison DeWitt: Phoebe?
Phoebe: I call myself Phoebe.
Addison DeWitt: And why not? Tell me, Phoebe, do you want someday to have an award like that of your own?
Phoebe: More than anything else in the world.

Addison DeWitt: Then you must ask Miss Harrington how to get one. Miss Harrington knows all about it.

All About Eve
All About Eve

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.

All About Eve
All About Eve

Margo: I detest cheap sentiment.

All About Eve
All About Eve

Margo: You bought the new girdles a size smaller, I can feel it.
Birdie: Something maybe grew a size larger.
Margo: When we get home you're going to get into one of those girdles and act for two and a half hours.
Birdie: I couldn't get into the girdle in two and a half hours.

All About Eve
All About Eve

Eve: 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.