Joe Gillis:
[narrating] 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.
--William Holden (as Joe Gillis) in Sunset Boulevard
--William Holden (as Joe Gillis) in Sunset Boulevard
Joe Gillis:
[voice-over] The whole place seemed to have been stricken with a kind of creeping paralysis - out of beat with the rest of the world, crumbling apart in slow motion.
--William Holden (as Joe Gillis) in Sunset Boulevard
--William Holden (as Joe Gillis) in Sunset Boulevard
Joe Gillis:
[voice-over] 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.
--William Holden (as Joe Gillis) in Sunset Boulevard
--William Holden (as Joe Gillis) in Sunset Boulevard
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.
--William Holden (as Joe Gillis) in Sunset Boulevard
[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.
--William Holden (as Joe Gillis) in Sunset Boulevard
Joe Gillis:
Audiences don't know somebody sits down and writes a picture; they think the actors make it up as they go along.
--William Holden (as Joe Gillis) in Sunset Boulevard
--William Holden (as Joe Gillis) in Sunset Boulevard
Joe Gillis:
May I say that you smell really special?
Betty Schaefer: It must be my new shampoo.
Joe Gillis: That's no shampoo. It's more like freshly-laundered linen handkerchiefs, like a brand new automobile.
--William Holden (as Joe Gillis) in Sunset Boulevard
Betty Schaefer: It must be my new shampoo.
Joe Gillis: That's no shampoo. It's more like freshly-laundered linen handkerchiefs, like a brand new automobile.
--William Holden (as Joe Gillis) in Sunset Boulevard
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.
--William Holden (as Joe Gillis) in Sunset Boulevard
--William Holden (as Joe Gillis) in Sunset Boulevard
Joe Gillis:
Now back to the typewritters by way of Washington Square
--William Holden (as Joe Gillis) in Sunset Boulevard
--William Holden (as Joe Gillis) in Sunset Boulevard
Joe Gillis:
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.
--William Holden (as Joe Gillis) in Sunset Boulevard
--William Holden (as Joe Gillis) in Sunset Boulevard
Joe Gillis:
There's nothing tragic about being fifty. Not unless you're trying to be twenty-five.
--William Holden (as Joe Gillis) in Sunset Boulevard
--William Holden (as Joe Gillis) in Sunset Boulevard
