Quotes from Lauren Bacall

Life is amazing, life is odd. Life is not what you expected it to be. Things happen... Growing up takes longer than you think.

The best things in life are clean living, good works, and big saphires. And not in that order.

It's inappropriate and vulgar and absolutely unacceptable to use your private life to sell anything commercially, but I think it's kind of a sickness.

Looking at yourself in a mirror isn't exactly a study of life.

I was never my favourite subject.

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

The big rule is that you must never get mixed up with a married man - never even look sideways at another woman's fella. Boy, I really was terrific at obeying that rule, wasn't I?

Life is not what you expected it to be.

Acting is a life of rejection.

I'm crazy enough to believe in taking chances in every way, in making choices and gambling with your life. That's the kind of gambling I believe in.

The purity of Jewish upbringing - the restrictions that one carries through life being a 'nice Jewish girl' - what a burden.

A planned life is a dead life.

You learn to rise above a lot of bad things that happen in your life. And you have to keep going.

There are guys who want to screw around all the time, which interests me not at all. God knows we've done that, been there, and we don't want to do that any more.

When you are playing a part like that where you have traveled - you begin to think, God what a great life. Independent, living alone and how dramatic.

I fairly often have thought how lucky I was. I knew everybody because I was married to Bogie, and that 25-year difference was the most fantastic thing for me to have in my life.

The biggest misconception people have about me is that I'm in control of every situation. I'm rarely in control of any situation.

I always wanted to work with Spencer Tracy, which never happened, although I knew him well. And I never worked with Cary Grant.

I put my career in second place throughout both my marriages and it suffered. I don't regret it. You make choices. If you want a good marriage, you must pay attention to that. If you want to be independent, go ahead. You can't have it all.

When I was a kid, it was Bette Davis. She was my idol. I used to cut school and sit in the back of the theater; of course, I would have snuck in because I couldn't afford a ticket.

It was Howard Hawks who changed my life.

Movies are great fun and wonderful when they're good. But you never get to see them till six months after they're finished. So you never get a sense of whether they're really well liked or how good they are. And you don't really know what the finished product is going to be like, because it's a director's medium.

When everything happens to you when you're so young, you're very lucky, but by the same token, you're never going to have that same feeling again. The first time anything happens to you - your first love, your first success - the second one is never the same.

Each time a friend dies, the present becomes the past, in an instant.