"My career was a hollow success, a tissue of fantasies on film. Cheryl loved my mother, and they were both comfortably endowed in my will. I had never before felt or believed I could be in such a dark hole mentally, physically, and worst of all spiritually. All the good in my life—my mother, my child, my work, my friends—was blotted out by the dead feeling that nothing really mattered. I hadnt heard that suicide was a cry for help. To me it meant putting a big stop to the pain and anguish. There was none of that Ill show them. Boy, they'll miss me when Im gone nonsense. I wasnt trying to hurt anyone. I was aware that everyone would go on and survive, but I knew I definitely could not. I wanted out."

“When I awoke in the morning, my mother and Julia Hislop were whispering in a corner. They didn't have to tell me why. I already knew that my father was dead. And when the feeling of peace wore off, the surprise at having known intensified my sense of loss and sorrow. Although I was only nine, I could imagine what death meant. I knew he was gone forever.”

“Humor has been the balm of my life, but it's been reserved for those close to me, not part of the public Lana.”

“I don't think I realized how difficult it was. Forgetting the tragedy for a moment, just growing up. I didn't exactly think that I was stupid at the time, and of course my friends had children, and they seemed perfectly normal; my child was normal. But again, fate—all of this is preordained. Like, when I've been asked, "Miss Turner, would you change anything if you could?", well sure I would like to change a lot of things! You know, falsities and mistakes that I've made, but you didn't know it at the time. It's only in retrospect that you realize.”

“I finally got tired of making movies where all I did was walk across the screen and look pretty. I got a big chance to do some real acting in The Postman Always Rings Twice, and I'm not going to slip back if I can help it. I tried to persuade the studio to give me something different. But every time I went into my argument about how bad a picture was, they'd say, 'well, it's making a fortune.' That licked me.”

“Always before in moments of crisis I called on that power we call God to help me through. This time, having lost faith in others and my faith in myself, I had lost my hope in God too. Now that hope returned. I really believed that He hadn't wanted me to die.”

“My goal was to have one husband and seven children, but it turned out to be the other way around.”