Lily Tomlin Quotes

The best mind-altering drug is truth.

Sometimes I worry about being a success in a mediocre world.

If you read a lot of books, you're considered well-read. But if you watch a lot of TV, you're not considered well-viewed.

If the formula for water is H₂O, is the formula for an ice cube H₂O squared?

If love is the answer, could you please rephrase the question?

For fast acting relief, try slowing down.

It's a more ridiculing, divisive humor today, especially with the advent of political incorrectness, which is a license to be as ridiculing and awful about certain groups... There should be room for everybody, absolutely, and then the culture is going to decide the prevailing weight. We can't decide it individually. Nobody is here without a reason. … I always had a different sensibility. I like a huge range of comedy — from broad and farcical, the most sensitive, the most understated — but I always wanted my comedy to be more embracing of the species rather than debasing of it.

Listen, I have no judgment about anything. Some people will bring certain celebrities up to me who are presumably — or known to be — gay and ask "Why don't they come out?" But we don't know why they don't, and it's none of our business, really. In '75 I was making the Modern Scream album, and Jane and I were in the studio. My publicist called me and said "Time will give you the cover if you'll come out." I was more offended than anything that they thought we'd make a deal. But that was '75 — it would have been a hard thing to do at that time.

Some journalists are just motivated by their own sense of what they want to say or what they feel comfortable saying or writing about. In '77, I was on the cover of Time. The same week I had a big story in Newsweek. In one of the magazines it says I live alone, and the other magazine said I live with Jane Wagner. Unless you were so really adamantly out, and had made some declaration at some press conference, people back then didn't write about your relationship.

I respect her talent and her brain and who she is as a person — and that kind of admiration and respect is a big factor in binding someone in a relationship. I know what a good heart she has, and how empathetic she is with all kinds of people and issues — she's so brilliant on top of it that she can voice these things. And she's as funny as she can possibly be. She makes me laugh.

Jane took me to another level because she's truly a wonderful writer. I'd put things together in the past and struggled with them. And then I met Jane. … I was doing my Edith Ann album in '71 — the album came out in '72. She'd done a thing on television called J.T. — it was about a kid in Harlem — and she won a Peabody for it. I later learned it was the first thing she'd ever written. It was written as an After School Special, but they played it in prime time — and they played it every year after that for about 25 years, or something. Anyway, I saw it and it was wonderful. It was poetic and sensitive and satiric and tender and funny and so many things compressed into this one hour. And I thought, "Oh, God, this is exactly what I want in a monologue." So I wrote Jane and asked her to help me do the Edith Ann album. I didn't hear from her for a while. Then, suddenly, about a week before I was supposed to go in and record, she sent me a lot of material. I persuaded her to come to California and help me produce it. Frankly, I was pretty taken with her as soon as I saw her. We just sort of clicked. We became a couple right away.

9 to 5 made people aware of equal pay for equal work. It hasn't really happened, but it has come closer. We're aware of sexual harassment, and of course, there are very few companies that have daycare centers, which seems to me would be the most humane, positive thing to do for a worker. The worker would be more loyal, they'd be more productive. It's so crazy not to do the human thing. It seems to me to be much more profitable to do the human thing. It just makes a better society.

The point I want to make is, the idea that people will say — out of the 170,000 people or however many were killed in the tsunami — they'll say, "God saved me." As if God particularly saved this person. There's a tremendous amount of narcissism in that belief, that God is speaking directly to you. I mean, it's unbelievable. … All these disparate opinions and points of view that people say they're getting as direct divine guidance — I've been concerned for decades about presidents who claim to be born again. And knowing that everyone I knew in the fundamentalist church or in the evangelical Christian church — they wanted the rapture to come. … We don't have to save the environment, because we're not going to be around.

We went to a Southern Baptist church. When I was a small child, until I was about 8 or 9 years old, I worried if I didn't go forward and get saved every Sunday — which I couldn't do, it was absolutely too humiliating to see these adults flailing and beating their breasts and sobbing, and I thought, Oh, my God, this is so ridiculous, so embarrassing — I could never bring myself to go forward. And I'd think, Oh, my God, if I don't go next Sunday, if the end of the world comes, I'll go to hell. And that's is a pretty hard thing for a 7- or 8-year-old to carry all the time

The larger picture is really to swing people's awareness of what really is moral. ... There are great clergy-people who absolutely do not agree with this. It's not whether God is on our side or whether we're doing God's will, it's being so narcissistic as to think that God is telling you what to do.