Top 100 Lauren Bacall Quotes
#1. I spent my childhood in New York, riding on subways and buses. And you know what you learn if you're a New Yorker? The world doesn't owe you a damn thing.
Lauren Bacall
#4. Here is a test to find out whether your mission in life is complete. If you're alive, it isn't.
Lauren Bacall
#5. You can't start worrying about what's going to happen. You get spastic enough worrying about what's happening now.
Lauren Bacall
#6. God - if the press ever quoted anyone correctly, it would be brilliant.
Lauren Bacall
#7. My definition of a star is someone who really lasts for a very long time.
Lauren Bacall
#8. How long an actress lives professionally depends on her stamina, the extent of her masochism, her imagination, and her yearning for recognition or approval.
Lauren Bacall
#9. Film is not a woman's medium. If you weren't the hottest kid in town, men stayed away from you.
Lauren Bacall
#10. If goodness is its own reward, shouldn't we get a little something for being naughty?
Lauren Bacall
#11. The best things in life are clean living, good works, and big saphires. And not in that order.
Lauren Bacall
#12. For my peculiar face, I look best when I look as though I'm not wearing make-up.
Lauren Bacall
#13. I finally felt that I came into my own when I went on the stage.
Lauren Bacall
#14. I'm a total Democrat. I'm anti-Republican. And it's only fair that you know it ... I'm liberal. The L word!
Lauren Bacall
#15. No, I'm afraid they might slip and hit a nerve and I'd end up with one side of my face hanging down or something. I'll just stick with this one for a while and take my chances. I'll be brave.
Lauren Bacall
#17. Standing still is the fastest way of moving backwards in a rapidly changing world.
Lauren Bacall
#18. I wasn't brought up as a society girl to go to balls and be a debutante and marry the social set and money and go to parties. No one in my family lived like that. And I never wanted to live like that. I was brought up to believe in work. I always wanted a career. Always.
Lauren Bacall
#20. I don't sit around thinking that I'd like to have another husband; only another man would make me think that way.
Lauren Bacall
#21. In the world of relationships, possibly the most complicated, uncommon, hard to find, hard to keep and most rewarding has got to be friendship.
Lauren Bacall
#22. I never believed marriage was a lasting institution. I thought that to be married for five years was to be married forever.
Lauren Bacall
#23. Actors today go into TV, which I don't consider has a lot to do with acting.
Lauren Bacall
#24. I studied dancing for 13 years. And loved to dance. Always wanted to dance with Fred Astaire.
Lauren Bacall
#25. I suppose there are times when I can't believe that I've lived the way that I have and done the things that I've done. Life's a joke anyway. It's all ridiculous. It's all so short.
Lauren Bacall
#26. But the amazing thing about life, I've finally discovered, is that you really don't learn from past mistakes. You do logically, reasonably, but emotionally not for a second.
Lauren Bacall
#27. Find me a man who's interesting enough to have dinner with and I'll be happy.
Lauren Bacall
#28. Life is amazing, life is odd. Life is not what you expected it to be. Things happen ... Growing up takes longer than you think.
Lauren Bacall
#29. Always I'm feeling, 'You're never going to work again.' That's going to happen one day, but I hope I'm not alive.
Lauren Bacall
#30. Young people, even in Hollywood, ask me, 'Were you really married to Humphrey Bogart?' 'Well, yes, I think I was,' I reply.
Lauren Bacall
#31. You realize yourself when you start reflecting - because I don't live in the past, although your past is so much a part of what you are - that you can't ignore it. But I don't look at scrapbooks.
Lauren Bacall
#33. Facing a situation head on was the only way to deal with anything. I learned the lesson early.
Lauren Bacall
#34. The madmen seem to live on forever, don't they?
Lauren Bacall
#35. When you talk about a great actor, you're not talking about Tom Cruise.
Lauren Bacall
#36. You are welcoming to everyone when you're a liberal. You do not have a small mind.
Lauren Bacall
#37. The big rule is that you must never get mixed up with a married man - never even look sideways at another woman's fella. Boy, I really was terrific at obeying that rule, wasn't I?
Lauren Bacall
#39. If there was one thing I had never been, it was mysterious, and if there was one thing I had never done, it was not talk.
Lauren Bacall
#40. The purity of Jewish upbringing - the restrictions that one carries through life being a 'nice Jewish girl' - what a burden.
Lauren Bacall
#41. If I could have lived as an actress in any period, it would have been the 1920s - I would have loved to have been part of that speakeasy era.
Lauren Bacall
#42. After the age of 30 in the movie profession, you're pretty well over as far as the casting people are concerned.
Lauren Bacall
#43. Generally women are better than men
they have more character. I prefer men for some things, obviously, but women have a greater sense of honor and are more willing to take a chance with their lives.
Lauren Bacall
#44. Hollywood is the only place in the world where an amicable divorce means each one gets fifty percent of the publicity.
Lauren Bacall
#45. I'm crazy enough to believe in taking chances in every way, in making choices and gambling with your life. That's the kind of gambling I believe in.
Lauren Bacall
#46. My mother was the greatest example to me of anyone I've ever known. She didn't have an easy life. I adored her. She worked hard all her life, and she was the one who set my values. She was quite an amazing woman, although she wasn't tough at all.
Lauren Bacall
#47. I have made mistakes in the past and been in movies that really weren't good, and that I needed the money at the time, or something
and the money wasn't even that great. But I needed it, and ... they come back on television, those movies ... to haunt you. And it's a nightmare!
Lauren Bacall
#48. A woman isn't complete without a man. But where do you find a man - a real man - these days?
Lauren Bacall
#49. When everything happens to you when you're so young, you're very lucky, but by the same token, you're never going to have that same feeling again. The first time anything happens to you - your first love, your first success - the second one is never the same.
Lauren Bacall
#51. One thing I am convinced of is that the more you do, the more you can do.
Lauren Bacall
#52. I always wanted to work with Spencer Tracy, which never happened, although I knew him well. And I never worked with Cary Grant.
Lauren Bacall
#53. I was this kid, and I was scared to death of all these pros around me ... My head would shake, and my hands would shake, and I discovered if I kept my head down and looked up, my head would not shake, so I started to do that when I could, when it was appropriate in a scene.
Lauren Bacall
#54. I think your whole life shows in your face and you should be proud of that.
Lauren Bacall
#55. You can't acquire a voice. Either you have it, or you don't.
Lauren Bacall
#56. I'll miss Hollywood. Of the twenty friends I thought I had, I'll miss the six I really had.
Lauren Bacall
#57. I'd like to meet the man who decided that people do or don't look Jewish. What the hell does that mean anyway? Is it the American penchant for pinning things down, catergorizing, for pigeonholing people? Whatever it is, it's wrong.
Lauren Bacall
#58. Let's face it: I want it all
just like you and everybody else. It may not be in the cards, but the prospect is so dazzling that I have to try.
Lauren Bacall
#59. As long as I can walk and talk, I'll try almost anything. I say "almost" because the high wire is definitely out.
Lauren Bacall
#60. Everything in this country [the US] has got to be good looks and unlined faces and thin bodies and people running around in skirts slit up to their ass. It has nothing to do with thinking or with being a human being. There is life in mature people; it's not all over at 24½.
Lauren Bacall
#61. To fly as fast as thought, you must begin by knowing that you have already arrived.
Lauren Bacall
#62. You spend a good part of your adult life acquiring things: building a home, filling it with objects that please your eye and make you feel comfortable. Then you spend the last part of your life trying to figure out how to get rid of it all.
Lauren Bacall
#63. I hope I'm thought of as not just a showbiz personality, but as someone who has lived a life and who has hopefully made a contribution to something along the way - someone who is a human being as well as an actress.
Lauren Bacall
#64. Each time a friend dies, the present becomes the past, in an instant.
Lauren Bacall
#66. I don't consider myself a great actress. I'm just trying to stay alive, actually. I think I'm good, and I've learned a lot, certainly, mostly in the theater. I've been sloughed off movies for years. But what can you do? That's life.
Lauren Bacall
#67. I would hate now to be married. It does occur to me on occasion that, if I fall and hit my head, there will be no one to make the phone call. But who wants to think about that disaster, I'd prefer not to.
Lauren Bacall
#68. I was this flat-chested, big-footed, lanky thing.
Lauren Bacall
#69. Childhood anxieties, childhood fears, never disappear entirely. They fade, but not away.
Lauren Bacall
#70. Most women use more brains picking a horse in the third at Belmont than they do picking a husband
Lauren Bacall
#71. I fairly often have thought how lucky I was. I knew everybody because I was married to Bogie, and that 25-year difference was the most fantastic thing for me to have in my life.
Lauren Bacall
#72. I adored 'Breaking The Waves,' so when Lars von Trier wanted me in 'Dogville,' I was beside myself with joy. He works in a way that nobody I've ever worked with works.
Lauren Bacall
#73. In Hollywood, an equitable divorce settlement means each party getting fifty percent of publicity.
Lauren Bacall
#74. You learn to rise above a lot of bad things that happen in your life. And you have to keep going.
Lauren Bacall
#75. His attention span was not long, shall we say?
Lauren Bacall
#76. Looking at yourself in a mirror isn't exactly a study of life.
Lauren Bacall
#77. Half of life's problems disappear when one's head is healthy.
Lauren Bacall
#78. It's just a fact of life that I don't think I've ever been taken particularly seriously in movies by movie makers. I don't know why.
Lauren Bacall
#79. I don't look in the mirror; don't like what I see; never have. I am not my idea of a beauty. Never was. This is not false modesty. I've just never been enamoured of my face, which of course is magnified umpteen times on screen.
Lauren Bacall
#80. I've always felt that work - learning from people who know more than I know - is what keeps you going.
Lauren Bacall
#81. If you want me, just whistle. You know how to whistle, don't you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow.
(as Marie 'Slim' Browning in To Have and Have Not)
Lauren Bacall
#82. I think I'm damn lucky. I'm lucky that my kids are all straight, that they haven't ended up in jail, that they're all worthwhile human beings, thank God. Their lives are happy; they have happy partners, wives, husbands.
Lauren Bacall
#83. People should tell your children what life is all about
it's about work ...
Lauren Bacall
#84. It's inappropriate and vulgar and absolutely unacceptable to use your private life to sell anything commercially.
Lauren Bacall
#85. That was my original dream, anyway, to be on stage. I think the stage is an actor's place because actors, it belongs to you.
Lauren Bacall
#87. They think actors are freaks - that we're a lot of drunks who party all the time and never work. Well, I for one work my tail off.
Lauren Bacall
#88. I always thought I had crooked eyebrows and crooked teeth. That's why I never understood why people called me a beauty.
Lauren Bacall
#89. I put my career in second place throughout both my marriages and it suffered. I don't regret it. You make choices. If you want a good marriage, you must pay attention to that. If you want to be independent, go ahead. You can't have it all.
Lauren Bacall
#90. In actual fact, I've never been one, even from childhood, to kind of analyze myself very much.
Lauren Bacall
#91. When I was a kid, it was Bette Davis. She was my idol. I used to cut school and sit in the back of the theater; of course, I would have snuck in because I couldn't afford a ticket.
Lauren Bacall
#92. A famous love story is hard to maintain when you both live in the spotlight.
Lauren Bacall
#93. I used to tremble from nerves so badly that the only way I could hold my head steady was to lower my chin practically to my chest and look up at Bogie. That was the beginning of The Look.
Lauren Bacall
#94. Men need to feel important. They feel better when they're with younger girls or unknown girls.
Lauren Bacall
#96. Isn't hope an incredible, a wonderfully demented thing?
Lauren Bacall
#97. You don't always win your battles, but it's good to know you fought
Lauren Bacall
#98. All actors are terrified - they just learn how to control it.
Lauren Bacall
#99. My every dream and hope, and far beyond, were to be realized. I couldn't have wished for a man as incredibly good as this man was. And even so I didn't realize every quality of Bogie's on that day. He was to surprise and delight me continually in the ensuing years
Lauren Bacall
#100. How many women do we know who were continually kissed by Clark Gable, William Powell, Cary Grant, Spencer Tracy and Fredric March? Only one: Myrna Loy.
Lauren Bacall
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