Lauren Bacall Quotes

35 Sourced Quotes

I think your whole life shows in your face and you should be proud of that.

Lauren Bacall
Nicole and I worked together on Dogville and we were friends when we started this. That laid the groundwork for our fabulous relationship on screen and off.

Lauren Bacall
My life has had meaning, with the friendships full and valuable and essential to me. My children, Steve, Leslie, and Sam, are all different-all first-rate human beings with high standards-whom I completely and unequivocally adore-don't always agree with-but always admire and respect. They all have wit and a sense of humor and, thank God, I have hung on to mine.

Lauren Bacall
I will never give up. I refuse to. Isn't hope an incredible, a wonderfully demented thing?

Lauren Bacall
... badly, playing the Missouri Waltz, or something.

Lauren Bacall
A man's illness is his private territory and, no matter how much he loves you and how close you are, you stay an outsider. You are healthy.

Lauren Bacall
Losing Bogey was horrible, obviously. Because he was young. And because he gave me my life. I wouldn't have had a — I don't know what would have happened to me if I hadn't met him — I would have had a completely different kind of life. He changed me, he gave me everything. And he was an extraordinary man.

Lauren Bacall
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.'

Lauren Bacall
I never believed marriage was a lasting institution... I thought that to be married for five years was to be married forever.

Lauren Bacall
In the world of relationships, possibly the most complicated, uncommon, hard to find, hard to keep and most rewarding has got to be friendship.

Lauren Bacall
He was... a womanizer, he wanted to be in the sack with everybody.

Lauren Bacall
You know you don't have to act with me, Steve. You don't have to say anything, and you don't have to do anything. Not a thing. Oh, maybe just whistle. You know how to whistle, don't you, Steve? You just put your lips together, and blow.

Lauren Bacall
Looking at yourself in a mirror isn't exactly a study of life.

Lauren Bacall
Well, his attention span was not long, shall we say.

Lauren Bacall
I find that through the sad times, work is what made my continuing, not breaking down, possible. In work, I was always someone else and I subconsciously reveled in that.

Lauren Bacall
Each time a friend dies, the present becomes the past, in an instant.

Lauren Bacall
The people I've known I must say are extraordinary. When I think about some of them, I can't believe that I knew them all. And I think the reason I knew most of them at the beginning was because they were of Bogie's generation, 25 years my senior, not mine. But they were the most talented people of all.

Lauren Bacall
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.

Lauren Bacall
Imagination is the highest kite that can fly.

Lauren Bacall
The purity of Jewish upbringing — the restrictions that one carries through life being a 'nice Jewish girl' — what a burden.

Lauren Bacall
All actors are terrified — they just learn how to control it.

Lauren Bacall
The real stakes in the theater are high — they are life stakes. That's what I love about it. You gamble with your life, and that's a gamble worth taking.

Lauren Bacall
On being asked what it was like to work alongside another screen legend, Nicole Kidman:
She's not a legend, she's a beginner. You can't be a legend at whatever age she is.

Lauren Bacall
Hollywood is the only place in the world where an amicable divorce means each one gets 50 per cent of the publicity.

Lauren Bacall
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.

Lauren Bacall
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.

Lauren Bacall
If there was one thing I had never been, it was mysterious, and if there was one thing I had never done, it was not talk.

Lauren Bacall
One thing I am convinced of is that the more you do, the more you can do.

Lauren Bacall
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.

Lauren Bacall
I went to a sneak preview... I was sort of stunned by it, because you don't realize what you've done. I never knew what was going to happen, but they knew. Warners knew, and Howard knew.

Lauren Bacall