Top 100 Maggie Smith Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Don’t be defeatist, dear, it’s very middle class.”

— Maggie Smith

2. “It is not your job to make other people comfortable with who you are.”

— Maggie Smith

3. “What is embarrassment but a relative of fear? You’ve been seen – caught – at being imperfect.”

— Maggie Smith

4. “Theres a difference between solitude and loneliness.”

— Maggie Smith

5. “People say it gets better but it doesn’t. It just gets different, that’s all.”

— Maggie Smith

6. “I’m hopeless – all I know is that time is going past so fast.”

— Maggie Smith

7. “The performances you have in your head are always much better than the performances on stage.”

— Maggie Smith

8. “It seems to me there is a change in what audiences want to see. I can only hope that’s correct, because there’s an awful lot of people of my age around now and we outnumber the others.”

— Maggie Smith

9. “I’m so moved to hear Celia Johnson again, so lovely.”

— Maggie Smith

10. “I like being outside and working with the elements. The elemental aspects of it. The physicality of it.”

— Maggie Smith

11. “There is a kind of invisible thread between the actor and the audience, and when it’s there it’s stunning, and there is nothing to match that.”

— Maggie Smith

12. “I like the ephemeral thing about theatre, every performance is like a ghost – it’s there and then it’s gone.”

— Maggie Smith

13. “The last couple of years have been a write-off, though I’m beginning to feel like a person now. My energy is coming back.”

— Maggie Smith

14. “It’s true I don’t tolerate fools but then they don’t tolerate me, so I am spiky. Maybe that’s why I’m quite good at playing spiky elderly ladies.”

— Maggie Smith

15. “Torma means “offering cake.” You offer the torma to your don. You feed the ghost that does you harm, “that which possesses you.” Giving it a little something sweet is a way of saying, Thank you for the pain you caused me, because that pain woke me up. It hurt enough to make me change. “Wish for more pain,” a friend’s therapist once told her, “because that’s how you’ll change.” It has to hurt so much that you have to do something differently. The pain forces your hand.”

— Maggie Smith

16. “How I picture it: We are all nesting dolls, carrying the earlier iterations of ourselves inside. We carry the past inside us. We take ourselves – all of our selves – wherever we go.”

— Maggie Smith

17. “I know there is something out there and like most people, I tend to believe in it more when things go bad.”

— Maggie Smith

18. “Try not to cry too much because it can be pretty heart-breaking and pretty hard.”

— Maggie Smith

19. “I just did adore Daniel – Daniel Radcliffe, who I had worked with before “Harry Potter” and spent a long time telling all the producers they had to see him because I thought he was so terrific. And it’s been sad thinking about it because of Alan Rickman.”

— Maggie Smith

20. “I believe that I am past my prime. I had reckoned on my prime lasting till I was at least fifty.”

— Maggie Smith

21. “The drama school was in Oxford – and it’s funny to think of it, but in those days when I started out the University was nearly all male. And they certainly weren’t mixed.”

— Maggie Smith

22. “I had a very good English teacher who said to me that she thought I ought to do it. She – I don’t know, she saw something thank goodness because I think if it hadn’t been encouraged by somebody that serious, I’m not sure what would’ve happened to me.”

— Maggie Smith

23. “I’d done “Gosford Park,” a film that Julian Fellowes had written that Robert Altman directed.”

— Maggie Smith

24. “It’s funny to be pigeonholed so late in life but there we are.”

— Maggie Smith

25. “The chemotherapy was very peculiar, something that makes you feel much worse than the cancer itself, a very nasty thing. I used to go to treatment on my own, and nearly everybody else was with somebody. I wouldn’t have liked that. Why would you want to make anybody sit in those places?”

— Maggie Smith

26. “I had been feeling a little rum. I didn’t think it was anything serious because years ago I felt a lump and it was benign. I assumed this would be too. It kind of takes the wind out of your sails, and I don’t know what the future holds, if anything.”

— Maggie Smith

27. “I think everybody who was in it thought they were all going to be Eartha Kitt or be big stars. That didn’t happen, but it was a wake-up call to have one’s first professional job on Broadway, I must say.”

— Maggie Smith

28. “I said ‘It can’t go on’ and he said ‘No, it can’t.’ Honestly, I don’t think I could have mattered less to him by then. But by then, nothing mattered to him.”

— Maggie Smith

29. “People think of you differently if you’ve been in their homes. They think they own you because they watched you while they were eating dinner, or they can turn you up or down, or even freeze you.”

— Maggie Smith

30. “I don’t think films about elderly people have been made very much. I think of Cocoon and Driving Miss Daisy. But they always seem to be fairly successful, so it’s a bit baffling as to why everybody has to be treated as if they were five-years-old.”

— Maggie Smith

31. “There were male colleges, and there were very few female colleges.”

— Maggie Smith

32. “I tend to head for what’s amusing because a lot of things aren’t happy. But usually you can find a funny side to practically anything.”

— Maggie Smith

33. “I think there’s always great tension because there never seems to be enough – there is always pressure. There’s always pressure because there isn’t enough time. There’s never enough time for a movie, it seems to me. Never.”

— Maggie Smith

34. “The thing is, often press people ask questions that are so personal that even your nearest and dearest wouldn’t ask them.”

— Maggie Smith

35. “Sort of what you do in drama school when asked to play something way out of your reach. Anyway, we used to laugh a lot about that. I used to say I’m not going to act old, Penelope. I’ll just be myself.”

— Maggie Smith

36. “I am just surprised to be doing anything at my age actually. When you think of where I am now and where I’ve come from, I am very pleased and very grateful to be standing up and delivering Julian’s great lines.”

— Maggie Smith

37. “An actor is somebody who communicates someone else’s words and emotions to an audience. It’s not me. It’s what writers want me to be.”

— Maggie Smith

38. “It was – it’s always very nice to be somebody rather grand.”

— Maggie Smith

39. “One went to school, one wanted to act, one started to act, and one’s still acting.”

— Maggie Smith

40. “There was nobody in the family who had ever done anything like that before. My brothers – I had two brothers. They were twins. They both became architects. They were both six years older.”

— Maggie Smith

41. “Chris and Toby are far too sane to be upset any more.”

— Maggie Smith

42. “Give the present the gift of your full attention.”

— Maggie Smith

43. “Accept that you are a work in progress, both a revision and a draft: you are better and more complete than earlier versions of yourself, but you also have work to do. Be open to change. Allow yourself to be revised.”

— Maggie Smith

44. “Today I think of myself as a ‘recovering pessimist.’ I know that optimism is not at odds with wisdom. It’s quite the opposite. I think of cynicism as cool but lazy, while hope is desperately uncool – it has sweaty palms and an earnest smile on its face. What I know to be true is that one hopeful person will accomplish more than a hundred cynics. Why? Because the hopeful person will try.”

— Maggie Smith

45. “When you get into the granny era, you’re lucky to get anything.”

— Maggie Smith

46. “Stop searching yourself trying to understand why someone else treated you the way they did. The answer is not inside you; it’s inside them, out of reach.”

— Maggie Smith

47. “Listen, I must be 110 by now. Granny is going to kick the bucket at some point.”

— Maggie Smith

48. “Where you get people who want to take a picture of you or take a picture of them with you.”

— Maggie Smith

49. “I’m far, far, far from that. But of course, that’s one of the joys of acting is that you can move up in the world, even if – you know, in the characters that you’re playing, even if you don’t.”

— Maggie Smith

50. “I don’t think films about elderly people have been made very much.”

— Maggie Smith