Top 140 Shirley Maclaine Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 3 of 3

101. “Fear is concealed in smiles and flashing teeth. ‘Please say you still love me,’ the kings and queens are really saying. And, when they fare badly, they return to their palaces and sleep fitfully.”

— Shirley Maclaine

102. “The best way to get husbands to do something is to suggest that perhaps they are too old to do it.”

— Shirley Maclaine

103. “I can’t advise any of the young ones, because I don’t know what their background was, but I would suggest that anyone who wants to be famous more than anything – there’s a real problem.”

— Shirley Maclaine

104. “I think the hill one has to trudge in order to understand a man’s baggage is more of a trek than I’d like to take right now.”

— Shirley Maclaine

105. “I think when I was in my early twenties and middle twenties I didn’t even know I wasn’t living up to my potential. A couple of friends told me I wasn’t and told me to get my act together, and it made a huge impact on me.”

— Shirley Maclaine

106. “Remember what people used to say about meditation? Now everyone is doing it.”

— Shirley Maclaine

107. “There are stars who are proficiently paranoid enough to hide what they really think. I can’t.”

— Shirley Maclaine

108. “The secret is to let the audience feel through the actress, rather than having the actress feel for the audience. When you can do that, you involved the audience almost without their knowledge or awareness.”

— Shirley Maclaine

109. “We cannot divorce what we are producing from what we are. We create technology out of the vision we have of ourselves. If we are blind in our conception of ourselves we will create a blind technology.”

— Shirley Maclaine

110. “It’s a big deal for me to say I’m over politics.”

— Shirley Maclaine

111. “When times are bad, people like to lose themselves in the sheer glamour of another period: beautiful wardrobes, magnificent meals served in elegant settings.”

— Shirley Maclaine

112. “I simply channeled a character, this time I allowed the character to inhabit me.”

— Shirley Maclaine

113. “My first few weeks in New York were an initiation into the kingdom of guts.”

— Shirley Maclaine

114. “Being a dancer meant you nearly always thought about food.”

— Shirley Maclaine

115. “My mother was Canadian, so you never knew what she was thinking.”

— Shirley Maclaine

116. “I wasn’t afraid of getting old, because I was never a great beauty.”

— Shirley Maclaine

117. “I’ve gotten crankier in my old age.”

— Shirley Maclaine

118. “I’ve made so many movies playing a hooker that they don’t pay me in the regular way anymore. They leave it on the dresser.”

— Shirley Maclaine

119. “I don’t feel competitive.”

— Shirley Maclaine

120. “If I had a party to attend and didn’t want to be there, I would play the part of someone who was having a lovely time.”

— Shirley Maclaine

121. “I live in too many cities.”

— Shirley Maclaine

122. “I love the idea that I’m the oldest one in the room because I can get away with anything!”

— Shirley Maclaine

123. “I’m an artist, therefore I think I am sensitive to human pain.”

— Shirley Maclaine

124. “Things are done according to money these days.”

— Shirley Maclaine

125. “I’m an expert in hookers. I’m an expert in doormats. I’m an expert in victims. They were the best parts. And when I woke up – sociologically, politically, and creatively – I could no longer take those parts and look in the mirror.”

— Shirley Maclaine

126. “I have to do two things at once or I get tired.”

— Shirley Maclaine

127. “I make my mistakes in public.”

— Shirley Maclaine

128. “Remember, I come from such an excessively overdone, red-carpet place called Hollywood. So I’m used to people blowing up their success in ways that are far above and beyond the truth.”

— Shirley Maclaine

129. “On things she had to pack before leaving her home in advance of a forest fire, 1996. Childhood pictures and pictures of my life. Do you know how many pictures that is? Not just this life; I have pictures from 13,000 lives.”

— Shirley Maclaine

130. “The comedy of class, played so straight, is a wonderful thing for an actor to sink their teeth into.”

— Shirley Maclaine

131. “Of course, we’re all a mass of contradictions.”

— Shirley Maclaine

132. “I think the world is in the mess it’s in because we are spiritually ignorant.”

— Shirley Maclaine

133. “Sometimes people who have their lives played out in public don’t feel they have the privacy to continually journey within. I did, and that’s why I have longevity.”

— Shirley Maclaine

134. “Movie makers now choose profit over vision.”

— Shirley Maclaine

135. “You let the energy go wherever it wants. I have such a rich spiritual life. Most people take drugs to experience that.”

— Shirley Maclaine

136. “If they would teach us from the time we’re little to meditate and get in touch with all that our souls know, we wouldn’t fight so much.”

— Shirley Maclaine

137. “Women love working together. That’s my experience anyway.”

— Shirley Maclaine

138. “I’ve always thought I was looking for myself whenever I traveled. Like a journey anywhere was really a journey through myself.”

— Shirley Maclaine

139. “The pickings are pretty slim when you have to play the part of a housewife who doesn’t go out of her apartment because she’s afraid she’s going to get mugged, or a woman who turns into her brother, who is a murderer.”

— Shirley Maclaine

140. “In some ways, America has grown up to be a masterpiece of self-concern.”

— Shirley Maclaine

141. “I think male actors get confused by their own vanity.”

— Shirley Maclaine

142. “Of course I’m schooled in the old school method: taking what I think the director wants, then reworking it through my own brain and heart.”

— Shirley Maclaine

143. “I have a lot of friends who are around. I’m having a wonderful time in my life now with my platonic relationships with men and women, because when that sexual tension is off the requirement of the interplay, then you get to who the people really are, and to yourself.”

— Shirley Maclaine

144. “I don’t know why anybody would be in awe of me.”

— Shirley Maclaine

145. “I’m not one for wardrobe.”

— Shirley Maclaine

146. “I found that no matter what unpleasantness I found myself involved with, if I stopped and asked myself, “Why have I created this? What am I learning from this?” the circumstance became not a tragedy but an enlightening experience.”

— Shirley Maclaine