Top 100 Bacall Quotes
#1. Lauren Bacall, James Garner, and Jack Lemmon - they're all gone now, but I was so impressed by them.
John Heard
#2. It's cinematographic to smoke. Imagine Lauren Bacall without a cigarette.
Marjane Satrapi
#3. Imagination is the highest kite one can fly.
-- Lauren Bacall
E.J. Jackson
#4. You can't get a bad picture out of Bacall. There's nothing eccentric about her. She's perfect all over and yet she looks like nobody else.
Louise Dahl-Wolfe
#5. I'd love to play a femme fatale in a film noir. I'm thinking of one of those roles that Lauren Bacall or Bette Davis might have played. What I wouldn't like is to suddenly find myself being cast, as many senior actresses seem to be, as the abbess in a convent.
Diana Quick
#6. Jeanne Moreau, Lauren Bacall, they had this unconventional beauty, this amazing charisma.
Josephine De La Baume
#7. I wanted to live where I could pop to the bar that Humphrey Bogart took Lauren Bacall to, or the little restaurant where Charlie Chaplin had a booth.
Ashley Jensen
#8. Joan Rivers telling Lauren Bacall her dress is all wrong is like Carrot Top telling Lenny Bruce he needs to get an edge.
Dennis Miller
#9. I know what love is: Tracy and Hepburn, Bogart and Bacall, Romeo and Juliet, Jackie and John and Marilyn ...
Ian Shoales
#10. To her all books were the same and, as with her subjects, she felt a duty to approach them without prejudice ... Lauren Bacall, Winifred Holtby, Sylvia Plath - who were they? Only be reading could she find out.
Alan Bennett
#11. I would love to have read about myself being compared to Lauren Bacall.
Rhea Seehorn
#12. [Lauren Bacall] and Bogie seemed to have the most enormous opinion of each other's charms, and when they fought it was with the utter confidence of two cats locked deliciously in the same cage.
Katharine Hepburn
#13. If you've got the body and the chutzpah, a pencil skirt is so sexy on older women. Look for ones that fall just below the knee. Think 1940s, cinched-in jackets - imagine you are Lauren Bacall on a date with Humphrey Bogart and you just absolutely have to wear very high heels.
Twiggy
#14. When I started acting, it was like a double identity crisis - your basic crisis, compounded by people saying, 'there goes Robards' kid, Bacall's kid.' Now I realize, sure, that gets your foot in the door, but once it's there, it's your foot. I'm not bothered anymore. I'm confident of my abilities.
Sam Robards
#15. 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
#18. Here is a test to find out whether your mission in life is complete. If you're alive, it isn't.
Lauren Bacall
#19. You can't start worrying about what's going to happen. You get spastic enough worrying about what's happening now.
Lauren Bacall
#20. God - if the press ever quoted anyone correctly, it would be brilliant.
Lauren Bacall
#21. My definition of a star is someone who really lasts for a very long time.
Lauren Bacall
#22. I used to dream of being other places, other people. It was an escape for me.
Lauren Bacall
#23. No, I don't like legend. I mean, I don't like the category. And to begin with, to me, a legend is something that is not on the Earth, that is dead
Lauren Bacall
#24. The industry is s**t, it's the medium that's great.
Lauren Bacall
#25. [Katharine Hepburn] was much stronger, much more opinionated than I am or ever was, and it was considered attractive on her. But not on me. I don't know. Maybe her Bryn Mawr accent was more appealing than mine.
Lauren Bacall
#26. 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
#27. Film is not a woman's medium. If you weren't the hottest kid in town, men stayed away from you.
Lauren Bacall
#28. If goodness is its own reward, shouldn't we get a little something for being naughty?
Lauren Bacall
#29. I'm total, total, total liberal and proud of it.
Lauren Bacall
#30. The best things in life are clean living, good works, and big saphires. And not in that order.
Lauren Bacall
#31. When a woman reaches twenty-six in America, she's on the slide. It's downhill all the way from then on. It doesn't give you a tremendous feeling of confidence and well-being.
Lauren Bacall
#32. Stupidity is not my favourite thing; I cannot deal with it.
Lauren Bacall
#33. For my peculiar face, I look best when I look as though I'm not wearing make-up.
Lauren Bacall
#34. I finally felt that I came into my own when I went on the stage.
Lauren Bacall
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. They're guys who want to screw around all the time, which interests me not at all. God knows we've done that, been there, and we don't want to do that any more.
Lauren Bacall
#38. No one has ever written a romance better than we lived it.
Lauren Bacall
#39. Howard Hawks said he'd like to put me in a film with Cary Grant or Humphrey Bogart. I thought, "Cary Grant-terrific! Humphrey Bogart-yucch."
Lauren Bacall
#40. A man's illness is his private territory and, no matter how much he loves you and how close you are, you stay an outsider. You are healthy.
Lauren Bacall
#42. Standing still is the fastest way of moving backwards in a rapidly changing world.
Lauren Bacall
#43. 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
#44. I remember my oldest son, Steve, saying to me once, 'I don't ever remember seeing you with an apron on.' And I thought, that's right, honey, you did not. That was his concept of what a mother should be.
Lauren Bacall
#45. "My obit is going to be full of Bogart, I'm sure," she says, adding, "I'll never know if that's true. If that's the way it is, that's the way it is."
Lauren Bacall
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. I never believed marriage was a lasting institution. I thought that to be married for five years was to be married forever.
Lauren Bacall
#50. Actors today go into TV, which I don't consider has a lot to do with acting.
Lauren Bacall
#51. I studied dancing for 13 years. And loved to dance. Always wanted to dance with Fred Astaire.
Lauren Bacall
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. Find me a man who's interesting enough to have dinner with and I'll be happy.
Lauren Bacall
#55. I'm not tough, and I never have been. I suppose over the years I've built up kind of a veneer to protect myself because I have functioned on my own for a long, long time, and I have never had a lot of flunkies preceding me to clear the way.
Lauren Bacall
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. Young people, even in Hollywood, ask me, 'Were you really married to Humphrey Bogart?' 'Well, yes, I think I was,' I reply.
Lauren Bacall
#59. Legends are all to do with the past and nothing to do with the present.
Lauren Bacall
#60. How in hell can you handle love without turning your life upside down? That's what love does, it changes everything.
Lauren Bacall
#61. 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
#63. Facing a situation head on was the only way to deal with anything. I learned the lesson early.
Lauren Bacall
#64. The madmen seem to live on forever, don't they?
Lauren Bacall
#65. I don't have an entourage. In fact, I have no live-in help.
Lauren Bacall
#66. When you talk about a great actor, you're not talking about Tom Cruise.
Lauren Bacall
#67. What is the point of working all your life and then stopping?
Lauren Bacall
#68. You are welcoming to everyone when you're a liberal. You do not have a small mind.
Lauren Bacall
#69. 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
#71. 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
#72. The purity of Jewish upbringing - the restrictions that one carries through life being a 'nice Jewish girl' - what a burden.
Lauren Bacall
#73. 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
#74. After the age of 30 in the movie profession, you're pretty well over as far as the casting people are concerned.
Lauren Bacall
#75. I am not a wealthy woman. I wish to hell I was, but I never had a wealthy man.
Lauren Bacall
#76. 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
#77. I was always a little unsteady in my self-belief. Then there was the Jewish thing. I love being Jewish, I have no problem with it at all. But it did become like a scar, with all these people saying you don't look it.
Lauren Bacall
#78. Hollywood is the only place in the world where an amicable divorce means each one gets fifty percent of the publicity.
Lauren Bacall
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. I figure if I have my health, can pay the rent and I have my friends, I call it 'content.'
Lauren Bacall
#83. A woman isn't complete without a man. But where do you find a man - a real man - these days?
Lauren Bacall
#84. 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
#86. When a person who is very ill decides to treat it like a slight virus, you play that game. If you make a big scene, I think it is yourself you are doing it for, not the person who's ill.
Lauren Bacall
#87. One thing I am convinced of is that the more you do, the more you can do.
Lauren Bacall
#88. The real stakes in the theater are high - they are life stakes. That's what I love about it. You gamble with your life, and that's a gamble worth taking.
Lauren Bacall
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. I think your whole life shows in your face and you should be proud of that.
Lauren Bacall
#92. You can't acquire a voice. Either you have it, or you don't.
Lauren Bacall
#93. I always brought up my children not to believe in Mothers Day gifts, and now I regret it.
Lauren Bacall
#94. I'll miss Hollywood. Of the twenty friends I thought I had, I'll miss the six I really had.
Lauren Bacall
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. To fly as fast as thought, you must begin by knowing that you have already arrived.
Lauren Bacall
#100. 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
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