Top 35 Ali MacGraw Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I live in Santa Fe, New Mexico. And I travel a tremendous amount. I’m in New York and California a lot, but then also I like faraway places a lot.”

— Ali MacGraw

2. “I have always felt that the way we treat animals is a pretty good indicator of the compassion we are capable of for the human race.”

— Ali MacGraw

3. “I’m in total awe of the technique of great film people. Because if you get your emotional life up to perfection by miracle on Take One, you better have a technique to keep doing it again and again and again.”

— Ali MacGraw

4. “Am I going to be able to be the person I want to be in this relationship?”

— Ali MacGraw

5. “The quality of my life has changed dramatically – not the events – but the way I handle them and my priorities and my sense of drama.”

— Ali MacGraw

6. “When one stops working at the height of one’s career, it’s just stupid not to say, ‘I want to make sure I have a house.’”

— Ali MacGraw

7. “My parents made no money whatsoever, but they really knew how to see, as artists. So a big adventure might be, on a hot, dreadful day with no place to go, to go out and draw our chickens with pastels. My parents gave me a sense of wonder.”

— Ali MacGraw

8. “Here’s what I had: I had the arrogance of saying I’d like to be in a ‘good’ movie, so in fact, when I was hot, I turned down a lot of stuff because I didn’t think I wanted to watch it.”

— Ali MacGraw

9. “I think something will soon have to be done to protect people from hacking and blogging and lying and spreading rumors and chasing you down the street. Lives are wrecked that way.”

— Ali MacGraw

10. “Looking at beautiful things is what makes me the happiest.”

— Ali MacGraw

11. “If you want to be watched 24 hours a day in everything you do, you can’t turn that around. You can’t wake up three years later and say, ‘Stop bothering me, I’m a serious actor,’ if all you’ve done is wear certain clothes and show up half-loaded at clubs.”

— Ali MacGraw

12. “You know, the fashion business is this legendary repository of young girls on their way to getting husbands. I really wanted to work.”

— Ali MacGraw

13. “I think it’s tough when you’re very young and you maybe fall for the celebrity and being the center of attention.”

— Ali MacGraw

14. “My ex-husband happens to be one of the most gifted moviemakers. And what is so bizarre about working with someone like that? I guess it is bizarre to be good friends with your ex-husband.”

— Ali MacGraw

15. “I’m very touched on a deep level by cruelty to animals.”

— Ali MacGraw

16. “There are so many kinds of love, and they’re all very intense for me.”

— Ali MacGraw

17. “Cruelty to animals can become violence to humans.”

— Ali MacGraw

18. “I was really involved with other people’s opinions of me, and it got heightened during my film career. I don’t have any opinion, good or bad about it, it just was. It’s not the way I feel now, and I think yoga has a lot to do with that.”

— Ali MacGraw

19. “People tell me that I am well-grounded. I am sane in the New England sense of the word.”

— Ali MacGraw

20. “If you’re a baby about the media, as I was, you can’t imagine what it’s like when the great approval machine shines its beam on you, when every time you cross the street someone comes out of a manhole to talk about your haircut.”

— Ali MacGraw

21. “I fully expect to be doing yoga for the rest of my life.”

— Ali MacGraw

22. “There’s so much craziness that comes along with being a movie star that you can get so confused. Unless you’ve spent your whole life waiting to be the centre of attention, it’s pretty terrifying.”

— Ali MacGraw

23. “I’m learning how to live in the present and be grateful for what’s working rather than look for the ‘what’s not working’ piece.”

— Ali MacGraw

24. “Modeling was so fleeting it doesn’t count in my life scheme.”

— Ali MacGraw

25. “I want to be a person who makes a quiet difference.”

— Ali MacGraw

26. “Every one of us gets to find our way, hopefully surrounded by love, but we still have to pick out our own way through the land mines of life. By accepting this and relinquishing control, there’s just extraordinary beauty.”

— Ali MacGraw

27. “In film, there’s so many little things where not just the actor can blow his lines, but technically, it doesn’t quite come off in the perfect way envisioned.”

— Ali MacGraw

28. “I’m a New Yorker, and working in New York was divine for me. I loved working there and going to work there, which I’ve been able to do three or four times in my career, and I just love it. It’s my favorite.”

— Ali MacGraw

29. “I’ve always loved animals and I always thought that they were, if not better, then the absolute equal of any two legged creature that God ever created.”

— Ali MacGraw

30. “It’s not so much what do I want to be doing in 15 years, it’s how I want to be in 15 years.”

— Ali MacGraw

31. “I’m much more famous than I am rich, but I’m able to scale back my lifestyle. I know a lot of people who were where I was who can’t imagine living any simpler, but I haven’t got a lot of expensive wants.”

— Ali MacGraw

32. “I had no real experience studying acting; I came to it having done other things for a living for many, many years, and I have this gigantic respect for experience and technique.”

— Ali MacGraw

33. “It’s been my experience that the longer I do yoga, the more I want to know, the more I am able to understand and the less judgmental I am.”

— Ali MacGraw

34. “I can’t remember when I wasn’t an animal rights activist.”

— Ali MacGraw

35. “I don’t enjoy other people’s dramas, and I don’t enjoy mine.”

— Ali MacGraw

36. “I had a romantic, ‘Aren’t I a good girl?’ take on divorce, but the truth is that was stupid.”

— Ali MacGraw