Lauren Bacall Quotes

The best thing about dreams is that youth holds on to them.

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.

There is always the fear that a wonder of the world can’t live up to expectations. Not so. The Taj Mahal was breathtakingly beautiful – if anything, better even than I’d been told. Beauty like that is too dazzling to be imagined.

Childhood anxieties, childhood fears, never disappear entirely. They fade, but not away.

Stop for a moment and ponder on the silliness of it. 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.

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

To fly as fast as thought, you must begin by knowing that you have already arrived.

That's absolutely one of my most favorite movies, for so many reasons. I fought for that part; I wanted it badly. I took a lower salary, I did everything. Grace Kelly said, "I'll never forgive you for playing that part. It was written for me". She [Kelly] got the prince [Rainier], I got the part.

You can't start worrying about what's going to happen. You get spastic enough worrying about what's happening now.

I’m not ashamed of what I am - of how I pass through this life. What I am has given me the strength to do it. At my lowest ebb I have never contemplated suicide. I value what is here too much. I have a contribution to make. I am not just take up space in this life. I can add something to the lives I touch. I don’t like everything I know about myself, and I’ll never be satisfied, but nobody’s perfect. I’m not sure where the next years will take me - what they will hold - but I’m open to suggestions.

I was Betty Bacall always. And Lauren was Howard Hawks... he felt that Lauren Bacall was better sounding than Betty Bacall. He had a vision of his own. He was a Svengali. He wanted to mold me. He wanted to control me. And he did until Mr. Bogart got involved.

Bacall: I'm a total Democrat. I'm anti-Republican. And it's only fair that you know it. Even though...

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... And to meet whom did Franklin D. Roosevelt find himself tempted to call off the Yalta Conference? Myrna Loy. And to see what lady in what picture did John Dillinger risk coming out of hiding to meet his bullet-ridden death in an alley in Chicago? Myrna Loy, in Manhattan Melodrama.

A planned life is a dead life.

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.