Quotes from Lauren Bacall

The first time anything happens to you - your first love, your first success - the second one is never the same.

You realize yourself when you start reflecting - because I don't live in the past, although your past is so much a part of what you are - that you can't ignore it. But I don't look at scrapbooks.

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.

I loved reading Grimm's fairy tales and Hans Christian Andersen, and I loved to dream about other worlds and other lives. Maybe that has something to do with having an incomplete family, being an only child. All I know is I loved to pretend, and all that was in tandem with my wanting to be an actress.

I'm a total Democrat. I'm anti-Republican. And it's only fair that you know it... I'm liberal. The L word!

How in hell can you handle love without turning your life upside down? That's what love does, it changes everything.

I never believed marriage was a lasting institution. I thought that to be married for five years was to be married forever.

They're 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.

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

the real stakes in the theater are high - they are life stakes. That's what I love about it. You gamble with your life, and that's a gamble worth taking.

Imagination is the highest kite one can fly.

Young people, even in Hollywood, ask me, 'Were you really married to Humphrey Bogart?' 'Well, yes, I think I was,' I reply.

A famous love story is hard to maintain when you both live in the spotlight.

You can't always be a leading lady.

I used to tremble from nerves so badly that the only way I could hold my head steady was to lower my chin practically to my chest and look up at Bogie. That was the beginning of "The Look."

I don't look in the mirror; don't like what I see; never have. I am not my idea of a beauty. Never was. This is not false modesty. I've just never been enamoured of my face, which of course is magnified umpteen times on screen.

I happen to watch public television more than anything else. I'm also a news junkie, so I watch a lot of CNN.

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.

I am not a has-been. I am a will be.

Imagination is the highest kite that can fly.

You can't start worrying about what's going to happen. You get spastic enough worrying about what's happening now.

Find me a man who's interesting enough to have dinner with and I'll be happy.

A man's illness is his private territory and, no matter how much he loves you and how close you are, you stay an outsider. You are healthy.

A woman isn't complete without a man. But where do you find a man - a real man - these days?