Marilyn delivers the message...

"I want to grow old without face-lifts...I want to have the courage to be loyal to the face I have made. Sometimes I think it would be easier to avoid old age, to die young, but then you'd never complete your life, would you? You'd never wholly know yourself." "With fame, you know, you can read about yourself, somebody else's ideas about you, but what's important is how you feel about yourself -for survival and living day to day with what comes up." "I am not interested in money. I just want to be wonderful."  "Fame is fickle and I know it. It has its compensations, but it also has its drawbacks and I've experienced them both." "No-one ever told me I was pretty when I was a little girl. All little girls should be told they are pretty, even if they aren't." "My illusions didn't have anything to do with being a fine actress. I knew how third rate I was. I could actually feel my lack of talent, as if it were cheap clothes I was wearing inside. But, my God, how I wanted to learn, to change, to improve!" "Only the public can make a star. It's the studios who try to make a system out of it." "If I play a stupid girl and ask a stupid question I've got to follow it through. What am I supposed to do -look intelligent?" "Some people have been unkind. If I say I want to grow as an actress, they look at my figure. If I say I want to develop, to learn my craft, they laugh. Somehow they don't expect me to be serious about my work." "I don't understand why people aren't a little more generous with each other."  Press comment on posing nude for calendar in 1949... "My sin has been no more than I have written posing for the nude picture because I need fifty dollars desperately to get my car out of hock." "There was my name up in lights. I said 'God, somebody's made a mistake. But there is was, in lights. And I sat there and said, 'Remember, your're not a star'. Yet there it was up in lights." "An actor is supposed to be a sensitive instrument. Isaac Stern takes good care of his violin. What if everybody jumped on his violin?" "That's the trouble, a sex symbol becomes a thing. But if I'm going to be a symbol of something, I'd rather have it sex than some other things we've got symbols of." "The only people I care about are the people in Times Square, across the street from the theatre, who can't get close as I come in. If I had light make-up on, they'd never see me. This make-up is for them..." "Men who think that a woman's past love affairs lessen her love for them are usually stupid and weak. A woman can bring a new love to each man she loves, providing there are not too many." "It stirs up envy, fame does. People...feel fame gives them some kind of privilege to walk up to you and say anything to you -and it won't hurt your feelings -like it's happening to your clothing."