Joe Gillis: Wait a minute, haven't I seen you before? I know your face.
Norma Desmond: Get out! Or, shall I call my servant?
Joe Gillis: You're Norma Desmond. You used to be in silent pictures. You used to be big.
Norma Desmond: I *am* big. It's the *pictures* that got small.
[last lines]
Norma Desmond: [to newsreel camera] And I promise you I'll never desert you again because after 'Salome' we'll make another picture and another picture. You see, this is my life! It always will be! Nothing else! Just us, and the cameras, and those wonderful people out there in the dark!... All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up.
Norma Desmond: We didn't need dialogue. We had faces!
Joe Gillis: Audiences don't know somebody sits down and writes a picture; they think the actors make it up as they go along.
Betty Schaefer: Don't you sometimes hate yourself?
Joe Gillis: Constantly.
Joe Gillis (as narrator): Well, this is where you came in, back at that pool again, the one I always wanted. It's dawn now and they must have photographed me a thousand times. Then they got a couple of pruning hooks from the garden and fished me out... ever so gently. Funny, how gentle people get with you once you're dead.
Joe Gillis (as narrator): The poor dope - he always wanted a pool. Well, in the end, he got himself a pool.
Joe Gillis: I didn't know you were planning a comeback.
Norma Desmond: I hate that word. It's a return, a return to the millions of people who have never forgiven me for deserting the screen.
First assistant director: [about Norma Desmond] She must be a million years old.
Cecil B. DeMille: I hate to think where that puts me. I could be her father.
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
Norma Desmond: You heard him. I'm a star.
Joe Gillis: Norma, you're a woman of 50, now grow up. There's nothing tragic about being 50, not unless you try to be 25.
Norma Desmond: The greatest star of them all.
Norma Desmond: No one ever leaves a star. That's what makes one a star.
Joe Gillis: I'm not an executive, just a writer.
Norma Desmond: You are, are you? Writing words, words, more words! Well, you'll make a rope of words and strangle this business! With a microphone there to catch the last gurgles, and Technicolor to photograph the red, swollen tongues!
Joe Gillis (as narrator): So they were turning after all, those cameras. Life, which can be strangely merciful, had taken pity on Norma Desmond. The dream she had clung to so desperately had enfolded her.
Norma Desmond: There once was a time in this business when I had the eyes of the whole world! But that wasn't good enough for them, oh no! They had to have the ears of the whole world too. So they opened their big mouths and out came talk. Talk! TALK!
Joe Gillis (as narrator): You don't yell at a sleepwalker - he may fall and break his neck. That's it: she was still sleepwalking along the giddy heights of a lost career.
Betty Schaefer: I've been hoping to run into you.
Joe Gillis: What for? To recover that knife you stuck in my back?
