Quotes from Carol Burnett

She lit another cigarette and smiled. "And that, kid, is when they added the S to the end of my last name." I laughed right through the kumquats. I miss her. She died early on the morning of my birthday in 1989, and I got my flowers and the card from her that afternoon.

As for the career, sometimes I catch myself daydreaming about being young again and doing it all over. Then I bring myself up short when I realize how incredibly fortunate I was.

Our legacy is really the lives we touch, the inspiration we give, altering someone's plan---if even for a moment---and getting them to think, rage, cry, laugh, argue...Walk around the block, dazed...More than anything, we are remembered for our smiles; the ones we share with our closest and dearest, and the ones we bestow on a total stranger, who needed it RIGHT THEN, and God put you there to deliver. ---Carrie Louise Hamilton, dedication page

You have to have faith that there is a reason you go through certain things. I can't say I'm glad to go through pain, but in a way one must, in order to gain courage and really feel joy.

On the good days, my mother would haul out the ukulele and we'd sit around the kitchen table - it was a cardboard table with a linoleum top - and sing.

I wanted to be on Broadway, but in musical comedy.

Jimmy Stewart and Lucille Ball were so unique.

People invite me to dinner not because I can cook, but because I like to clean up. I get immediate gratification from windex. Yes, I do windows.

My grandmother and I followed my mother here, to a house a block north of Hollywood Boulevard but a million miles away from Hollywood, if you know what I mean. We would hang out behind the ropes and look at the movie stars arriving at the premieres.

I have always grown from my problems and challenges, from the things that don't work out, that's when I've really learned.

Steve Martin in 'All of Me,' when he did that whole thing where he was possessed by the spirit in his body? It was brilliant.

We don't stop going to school when we graduate.

I have an iPhone, and I can text, and I can use the phone, and I can even take pictures with it.

Edgy is fine - I'm not a prude by any stretch of the imagination - but what's wrong with a good ol' belly laugh? I miss that.

I struggled for a while, but when I was cast in an Off Broadway show called 'Once Upon a Mattress,' that kind of put me on the map.

I'm not always optimistic. You wouldn't have all cylinders cooking if you were always like Mary Poppins.

I've always been optimistic. And I have a feeling that it happened because of going to all those movies with my grandmother in the '40s because there was no cynicism.

I had it in my contract with CBS, a very weird clause that was never written before and certainly not since, that if I wanted to do a variety show within the first five years of the contract, CBS would have to put it on for 30 shows.

I was kind of shy as a kid. I was a pretty good student. I was a wallflower, or nerd, if you will.

I had always been quiet and studious in school. I was the high school editor of the newspaper.

I didn't really get comfortable until I got to UCLA, and I had to take an acting course because I was studying theater arts.

I very much enjoyed doing 'Law & Order,' playing a killer - that was fun, and they had a family feel around the set, so it was a happy show to do even though the subject matter was quite the opposite.

I love audiences.

You know, one wonderful thing that came out of my Enquirer experience is that, in my case, it was ruled tabloids are magazines. Which means they didn't have the protection that a newspaper has.