Quotes from Lauren Bacall

We started out to see some of Paris on foot with him, stopping at the famous Café de la Paix, where you were supposed to see everyone you knew if you just sat there long enough. To sit at a sidewalk café having coffee or a drink – the sound and sight of France all around. The Champs-Elysées was incredible – the chestnut trees – how could one city attain such perfection? Who had dreamed it up? Who had made it all come true? I wanted to see every corner of it.

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

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

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

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.

Fifty years on, we're still watching her movies and talking about her. That's not a dumb woman – trust me!

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

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

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.

Imagination is the highest kite you can fly." — Lauren Bacall

like this – I'd thought it would be neat and tidy, one reporter at a time. I didn't know then how Charlie Einfeld

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

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...

Most women use more brains picking a horse in the third at Belmont than they do picking a husband

Stardom isn't a profession, it's an accident.

There were times, sure, I wanted my career to go better. But once it starts to go downhill, you can never get back, or only to some degree.

Film is not a woman's medium. If you weren't the hottest kid in town, men stayed away from you.

I've always felt that work - learning from people who know more than I know - is what keeps you going.

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.

After the age of 30 in the movie profession, you're pretty well over as far as the casting people are concerned.

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.

I like to work with really good professional people - anyone with real talent.

I'm not tough, and I never have been. I suppose over the years I've built up kind of a veneer to protect myself because I have functioned on my own for a long, long time, and I have never had a lot of flunkies preceding me to clear the way.

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.