Lily Tomlin Quotes

43 Sourced Quotes

All my life I've wanted to be somebody. But now I see I should have been more specific.
Tomlin speaking as an ineffectual aerobics instructor

Lily Tomlin
The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat.

Lily Tomlin
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.

Lily Tomlin
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.

Lily Tomlin
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

Lily Tomlin
Why is it when we talk to God we're said to be praying — but when God talks to us, we're said to be schizophrenic?

Lily Tomlin
Don't be afraid of missing opportunities. Behind every failure is an opportunity somebody wishes they had missed.

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

Lily Tomlin
All my life, I've always wanted to be somebody, but I see now I should have been more specific.

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

Lily Tomlin
If truth is beauty, how come no one has their hair done in the library?

Lily Tomlin
When you're dancing the mystical dance of the molecules, you're not the one who's leading.

Lily Tomlin
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.

Lily Tomlin
I've seen these women all my life, I know how they walk, I know how they talk...

Lily Tomlin
I like a teacher who gives you something to take home to think about besides homework

Lily Tomlin
Reality is a crutch for people who can't cope with drugs.

Lily Tomlin
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.

Lily Tomlin
Reality is the leading cause of stress amongst those in touch with it....

Lily Tomlin
I feel some part of me can wake up and be very existential and the next day wake up and be sort of in love with the universe.

Lily Tomlin
Truth is, I've always been selling out. The difference is that in the past, I looked like I had integrity because there were no buyers.

Lily Tomlin
If beauty is truth, why don't women go to the library to have their hair done?

Lily Tomlin
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.

Lily Tomlin
No matter how cynical you become, it's never enough to keep up.

Lily Tomlin
The Fifties was the most sexually frustrated decade ever: ten years of foreplay. And the Sixties, well, the Sixties was like coitus interruptus. The only thing we didn't pull out of was Vietnam.

Lily Tomlin
Why isn't there a special name for the tops of your feet?

Lily Tomlin
There will be sex after death; we just won't be able to feel it.

Lily Tomlin
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.

Lily Tomlin
I have always felt that humor was a wonderful vehicle to let us become connected with each other and ourselves… I try to portray the similarities and polarities in men and women, so that we can acknowledge and embrace our collective consciousness.

Lily Tomlin
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.

Lily Tomlin
It's my belief we developed language because of our deep inner need to complain.

Lily Tomlin