Top 90 Lauren Bacall Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “No, I’m afraid they might slip and hit a nerve and I’d end up with one side of my face hanging down or something. I’ll just stick with this one for a while and take my chances. I’ll be brave.”

— Lauren Bacall

52. “A woman isn’t complete without a man. But where do you find a man – a real man – these days?”

— Lauren Bacall

53. “You can’t always be a leading lady.”

— Lauren Bacall

54. “Remember what Bogie and my mother both used to say: ‘Character is the most important thing. All that matters is character!’”

— Lauren Bacall

55. “I’m not a sedentary person. I’ve always been active.”

— Lauren Bacall

56. “Looking at yourself in a mirror isn’t exactly a study of life.”

— Lauren Bacall

57. “Howard Hawks said he’d like to put me in a film with Cary Grant or Humphrey Bogart. I thought, “Cary Grant-terrific! Humphrey Bogart-yucch.””

— Lauren Bacall

58. “The madmen seem to live on forever, don’t they?”

— Lauren Bacall

59. “I don’t consider myself a great actress. I’m just trying to stay alive, actually. I think I’m good, and I’ve learned a lot, certainly, mostly in the theater. I’ve been sloughed off movies for years. But what can you do? That’s life.”

— Lauren Bacall

60. “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.”

— Lauren Bacall

61. “When you talk about a great actor, you’re not talking about Tom Cruise.”

— Lauren Bacall

62. “Acting is a life of rejection.”

— Lauren Bacall

63. “I remember my oldest son, Steve, saying to me once, ‘I don’t ever remember seeing you with an apron on.’ And I thought, that’s right, honey, you did not. That was his concept of what a mother should be.”

— Lauren Bacall

64. “I think I’m damn lucky. I’m lucky that my kids are all straight, that they haven’t ended up in jail, that they’re all worthwhile human beings, thank God. Their lives are happy; they have happy partners, wives, husbands.”

— Lauren Bacall

65. “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

66. “Actors today go into TV, which I don’t consider has a lot to do with acting.”

— Lauren Bacall

67. “God if the press ever quoted anyone correctly it would be brilliant.”

— Lauren Bacall

68. “Always I’m feeling, ‘You’re never going to work again.’ That’s going to happen one day, but I hope I’m not alive.”

— Lauren Bacall

69. “His attention span was not long, shall we say?”

— Lauren Bacall

70. “From my own self-analysis, which I seldom indulge in, I am what I am.”

— Lauren Bacall

71. “Young people, even in Hollywood, ask me, ‘Were you really married to Humphrey Bogart?’ ‘Well, yes, I think I was,’ I reply.”

— Lauren Bacall

72. “Growing up takes longer than you think.”

— Lauren Bacall

73. “Let’s face it: I want it all – just like you and everybody else. It may not be in the cards, but the prospect is so dazzling that I have to try.”

— Lauren Bacall

74. “I am not a wealthy woman. I wish to hell I was, but I never had a wealthy man.”

— Lauren Bacall

75. “Isn’t hope an incredible, a wonderfully demented thing?”

— Lauren Bacall

76. “No, I don’t like legend. I mean, I don’t like the category. And to begin with, to me, a legend is something that is not on the Earth, that is dead.”

— Lauren Bacall

77. “They think actors are freaks – that we’re a lot of drunks who party all the time and never work. Well, I for one work my tail off.”

— Lauren Bacall

78. “My every dream and hope, and far beyond, were to be realized. I couldn’t have wished for a man as incredibly good as this man was. And even so I didn’t realize every quality of Bogie’s on that day. He was to surprise and delight me continually in the ensuing years.”

— Lauren Bacall

79. “I called my business manager in California and said, ‘Sell all of my stock’ – what little of it I had – and it’s the only smart financial move I ever made.”

— Lauren Bacall

80. “I don’t sit around thinking that I’d like to have another husband; only another man would make me think that way.”

— Lauren Bacall

81. “I hope I’m thought of as not just a showbiz personality, but as someone who has lived a life and who has hopefully made a contribution to something along the way – someone who is a human being as well as an actress.”

— Lauren Bacall

82. “I finally felt that I came into my own when I went on the stage.”

— Lauren Bacall

83. “Actors today go into TV, which I don’t consider has a lot to do with acting. They only think of stardom. If you photograph well, that’s enough. I have a terrible time distinguishing one from another. Girls wear their hair the same, and are much too anorexic-looking.”

— Lauren Bacall

84. “How long an actress lives professionally depends on her stamina, the extent of her masochism, her imagination, and her yearning for recognition or approval.”

— Lauren Bacall

85. “Half of life’s problems disappear when one’s head is healthy.”

— Lauren Bacall

86. “All actors are terrified – they just learn how to control it.”

— Lauren Bacall

87. “But the amazing thing about life, I’ve finally discovered, is that you really don’t learn from past mistakes. You do logically, reasonably, but emotionally not for a second.”

— Lauren Bacall

88. “I believe in the truth, and I believe in saying what you think. Why not? Do you have to go around whispering all the time or playing a game with people? I just don’t believe in that. So I’m not the most adored person on the face of the earth. You have to know this. There are a lot of people who don’t like me at all, I’m very sure of that. But I wasn’t put on earth to be liked. I have my own reasons for being and my own sense of what is important and what isn’t, and I’m not going to change that.”

— Lauren Bacall

89. “Childhood anxieties, childhood fears, never disappear entirely. They fade, but not away.”

— Lauren Bacall

90. “In Hollywood, an equitable divorce settlement means each party getting fifty percent of publicity.”

— Lauren Bacall

91. “The best thing about dreams is that youth holds on to them.”

— Lauren Bacall

92. “Facing a situation head on was the only way to deal with anything. I learned the lesson early.”

— Lauren Bacall

93. “To fly as fast as thought, you must begin by knowing that you have already arrived.”

— Lauren Bacall

94. “There is always the fear that a wonder of the world can’t live up to expectations. Not so. The Taj Mahal was breathtakingly beautiful – if anything, better even than I’d been told. Beauty like that is too dazzling to be imagined.”

— Lauren Bacall