Lauren Bacall

“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.”

“I finally felt that I came into my own when I went on the stage.”

“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.”

“Stupidity is not my favourite thing; I cannot deal with it.”

“You learn to rise above a lot of bad things that happen in your life. And you have to keep going.”

“It was Howard Hawks who changed my life.”

“We live in an age of mediocrity.”

“I am not a has-been. I am a will be.”

“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.”

“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.”

“My feeling about the movies is that most of them are terrible. If you don't have a decent script and a decent director, forget it.”

“A famous love story is hard to maintain when you both live in the spotlight.”

“I'm not a sedentary person. I've always been active.”

“There were times, sure, I wanted my career to go better. But once it starts to go downhill, you can never get back, or only to some degree.”

“Looking at yourself in a mirror isn't exactly a study of life.”

“Movies are great fun and wonderful when they're good. But you never get to see them till six months after they're finished. So you never get a sense of whether they're really well liked or how good they are. And you don't really know what the finished product is going to be like, because it's a director's medium.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Find me a man who's interesting enough to have dinner with and I'll be happy.”

“When you talk about a great actor, you're not talking about Tom Cruise. His whole behavior is so shocking. It's inappropriate and vulgar and absolutely unacceptable to use your private life to sell anything commercially, but I think it's kind of a sickness.”