Top 50 Gloria Vanderbilt Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “If you have health, you have everything.”

— Gloria Vanderbilt

2. “I’ve always believed that one woman’s success can only help another woman’s success.”

— Gloria Vanderbilt

3. “You breathe in and out; you breathe in and you breathe out, and you live one moment into the next moment, and then time goes by, and you find you’re able to put one foot in front of the other.”

— Gloria Vanderbilt

4. “There’s a saying I read recently; I painted it on the fireplace and in my studio: “Be kind to everyone you meet, for everyone is fighting a great battle.” We all are. Everyone.”

— Gloria Vanderbilt

5. “I love to think that animals and humans and plants and fishes and trees and stars and the moon are all connected.”

— Gloria Vanderbilt

6. “I’m always in love. If it’s not with a man, it’s something else. I love beauty. I love the sky I see outside the window. There’s so much beauty in the world.”

— Gloria Vanderbilt

7. “I love to decorate and redecorate. Now it’s called interior design, but the term decorating is fine with me.”

— Gloria Vanderbilt

8. “If you’ve never had a mother or a father, you grow up seeking something you’re never going to find, ever. You seek it in love and in people and in beauty.”

— Gloria Vanderbilt

9. “The minute that you bring a unicorn into a story, you know that it’s a fairy tale or a fable, because unicorns don’t exist as animals. They exist as fantasy creatures.”

— Gloria Vanderbilt

10. “I don’t like cold people at all. It makes me feel really insecure.”

— Gloria Vanderbilt

11. “One of the goals of life is to try and be in touch with one’s most personal themes-the values, the ideas, styles, colors that are the touchstones of one’s own individual life, its real texture and substance.”

— Gloria Vanderbilt

12. “You must always have great, secret, big fat hopes for yourself in love and in life. The bigger, the better.”

— Gloria Vanderbilt

13. “When I was being photographed, I always felt very much in my own skin. That’s probably one of the reasons why I enjoy being photographed.”

— Gloria Vanderbilt

14. “Cats are so interesting – endlessly fascinating.”

— Gloria Vanderbilt

15. “Why not me? Suffering, she understood, is, in fact, random, universal.”

— Gloria Vanderbilt

16. “Some of us are born with a sense of loss. It is not acquired as we grow. It is already there from the beginning, and it pervades us throughout our lives.”

— Gloria Vanderbilt

17. “I was born during an eclipse. I believe very much in astrology. If you were born on an eclipse it indicates your destiny is chaotic.”

— Gloria Vanderbilt

18. “To be happy – one must find one’s bliss.”

— Gloria Vanderbilt

19. “I think something wonderful is going to happen to me. Maybe tomorrow. The phone can ring and your whole life can change.”

— Gloria Vanderbilt

20. “In mythology and palmistry, the left hand is called the dreamer because the ring finger on the left hand leads directly to the heart. I find it a very poetic idea. And thats why I only wear nail polish on my left ring finger.”

— Gloria Vanderbilt

21. “I do take very good care of myself, and I’m always in love. And by that I mean I have an appetite for life. I’m in love with beauty and things and people and love and being in love, and those things I think, on the inside, show on the outside.”

— Gloria Vanderbilt

22. “Everything in life is elusive.”

— Gloria Vanderbilt

23. “The heart of another is a dark forest.”

— Gloria Vanderbilt

24. “I believe in marriage and fidelity.”

— Gloria Vanderbilt

25. “I was fearless. Wild horses couldn’t stop me.”

— Gloria Vanderbilt

26. “If you don’t have a father, you don’t miss it, because you don’t know what it is. It was really only when I married Wyatt Cooper that I understood what it was like to have a father, because he was just an extraordinary father.”

— Gloria Vanderbilt

27. “I have a tremendous appetite for life; the phone rings and your whole life could change.”

— Gloria Vanderbilt

28. “Remember whenever money is involved, it brings out horrific things in people. It has the power not only to split families apart, but to destroy the foundations of one’s life. Never lose site of this. Take time and be certain you place your trust in those whose interests and goals mirror your own.”

— Gloria Vanderbilt

29. “I don’t read anything about myself. As a child, there was something in me that was just instinctive. I want to be clear in my spirit, and I don’t want to be blocked by things that get inside of you and kill you.”

— Gloria Vanderbilt

30. “I’ve resolved so many things in my life. I like the idea of showing that you can go through a lot and still be on your feet, still be working, and still be positive about life.”

— Gloria Vanderbilt

31. “I do spend money. I like to spend money, on houses – on furnishing houses. And I love to give presents to people. It’s just in my nature to be that way. I always spent money I had. And I always spent what I made. I’m not stingy.”

— Gloria Vanderbilt

32. “I don’t categorize myself as an 85-year-old woman who has written an erotic novel. I categorize myself as a writer who’s written an erotic novel.”

— Gloria Vanderbilt

33. “The fame you earn has a different taste from the fame that is forced upon you.”

— Gloria Vanderbilt

34. “In anything there has to be dark and light. There’s a lot of joy in my paintings and a lot of darkness.”

— Gloria Vanderbilt

35. “A home is very, very important to me. But I do change things around a lot.”

— Gloria Vanderbilt

36. “When I was photographed, I didn’t feel I was acting. I just felt I was being photographed. It sort of taught me things about myself that I didn’t know and was trying to find out.”

— Gloria Vanderbilt

37. “I’ve had many, many loves. I always feel that something wonderful is going to happen. And it always does.”

— Gloria Vanderbilt

38. “Throughout my life I have taken detours in acting and writing, but art remains my abiding passion.”

— Gloria Vanderbilt

39. “I’ll always remain friends with men I’ve been in love with. Each one gave me so much, in so many ways.”

— Gloria Vanderbilt

40. “Many times, working is kind of like channeling, and I really don’t know what’s going to fall on the page. I just did this image of a fat girl and put her on a tiny mountain peak of grass that she’s walking over. It just amused me.”

— Gloria Vanderbilt

41. “And it came to me, and I knew what I had to have before my soul would rest. I wanted to belong – to belong to my mother. And in return – I wanted my mother to belong to me.”

— Gloria Vanderbilt

42. “I’m the girliest girl you are ever going to meet.”

— Gloria Vanderbilt

43. “Death is the price you paid for being born.”

— Gloria Vanderbilt

44. “A work of fiction is conceived very much the same way as a dream occurs in the mind of a sleeper.”

— Gloria Vanderbilt

45. “I’ve been really very fortunate with the men I’ve been involved with. They’ve always really treated me very, very wonderfully. And whenever anything broke up, I was always the one to leave. So I think I’ve been really very, very lucky.”

— Gloria Vanderbilt

46. “I’m a ham. I always like to answer spontaneously.”

— Gloria Vanderbilt

47. “I don’t think age has anything to do with what you write about.”

— Gloria Vanderbilt

48. “Have great, secret, big, fat hopes for yourself.”

— Gloria Vanderbilt

49. “The only thing that would ever embarrass me would be something I would write that would be badly written.”

— Gloria Vanderbilt

50. “The craving to be famous is like an insidious disease, no matter how well known you become it’s never enough, it never satisfies.”

— Gloria Vanderbilt