Brighton Rock (1938)
“Don't be obsessed with tactics but with purpose. Tactics have a half life.”
“It is not life that's complicated, it's the struggle to guide and control life.”
Source: This Side of Paradise
“The only intelligent tactical response to life’s horror is to laugh defiantly at it”
“Life is too complicated to use analogies to describe it.”
Prayer and the Art of Volkswagen Maintenance (2000, Harvest House Publishers)
“My life has been a series of emergencies.”
Quoted in Wayne, Jane E.: The Golden Girls of MGM: Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Lana Turner, Judy Garland, Ava Gardner, Grace Kelly and Others (2003), p. 176.
On her career
“Death is simple. Life is messy. Give me life, the more complicated the better.”
“Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.”
Attributed on the internet but not found in print prior to an attribution in Aero Digest, Vols. 58–59, 1949, p. 115 https://books.google.com/books?id=q2ofAQAAMAAJ&dq=%22Life+is+simple%22+but+we+insist+on+making+it+complicated&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=%22Life+is+simple%22+
Misattributed, Not Chinese
“The Simple Life is the last refuge of complicated and restless souls.”
Source: A Lodge in the Wilderness (1906), Ch. I, p. 22
