Ali MacGraw

“My parents made no money whatsoever, but they really knew how to see, as artists. So a big adventure might be, on a hot, dreadful day with no place to go, to go out and draw our chickens with pastels. My parents gave me a sense of wonder.”

“If you're a baby about the media, as I was, you can't imagine what it's like when the great approval machine shines its beam on you, when every time you cross the street someone comes out of a manhole to talk about your haircut.”

“I think it's tough when you're very young and you maybe fall for the celebrity and being the center of attention.”

“I think that I was lucky that I was 30 when I did 'Love Story', which came with this extravagant pop celebrity. I had already done 15 years of what I call 'real' work.' I was a waitress, chambermaid, and a photographer's assistant, so I knew that I was tremendously lucky as a novice actor to have that big hit.”

“I was really involved with other people's opinions of me, and it got heightened during my film career. I don't have any opinion, good or bad about it, it just was. It's not the way I feel now, and I think yoga has a lot to do with that.”

“You know, the fashion business is this legendary repository of young girls on their way to getting husbands. I really wanted to work.”

“I'm learning how to live in the present and be grateful for what's working rather than look for the 'what's not working' piece.”

“It's been my experience that the longer I do yoga, the more I want to know, the more I am able to understand and the less judgmental I am.”

“People tell me that I am well-grounded. I am sane in the New England sense of the word.”

“I think something will soon have to be done to protect people from hacking and blogging and lying and spreading rumors and chasing you down the street. Lives are wrecked that way.”

“I've always loved animals and I always thought that they were, if not better, then the absolute equal of any two legged creature that God ever created.”

“Here's what I had: I had the arrogance of saying I'd like to be in a 'good' movie, so in fact, when I was hot, I turned down a lot of stuff because I didn't think I wanted to watch it.”

“I had a romantic, 'Aren't I a good girl?' take on divorce, but the truth is that was stupid.”

“I think we live in a time where people are just insane on the subject of how they look.”

“Modeling was so fleeting it doesn't count in my life scheme.”

“I want to be a person who makes a quiet difference.”

“I'm in total awe of the technique of great film people. Because if you get your emotional life up to perfection by miracle on Take One, you better have a technique to keep doing it again and again and again.”

“I fully expect to be doing yoga for the rest of my life.”

“If you want to be watched 24 hours a day in everything you do, you can't turn that around. You can't wake up three years later and say, 'Stop bothering me, I'm a serious actor,' if all you've done is wear certain clothes and show up half-loaded at clubs.”

“It's not so much what do I want to be doing in 15 years, it's how I want to be in 15 years.”