Lauren Bacall Quotes

If you want me, just whistle. You know how to whistle, don't you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow." (as Marie 'Slim' Browning in To Have and Have Not)

Imagination is the highest kite that can fly.

Here is a test to find out whether your mission in life is complete. If you’re alive, it isn’t.

You don’t always win your battles, but it’s good to know you fought

When you talk about a great actor, you're not talking about Tom Cruise.

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

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

I think your whole life shows in your face and you should be proud of that.

I’m not ashamed of what I am - of how I pass through this life. What I am has given me the strength to do it. At my lowest ebb I have never contemplated suicide. I value what is here too much. I have a contribution to make. I am not just take up space in this life. I can add something to the lives I touch. I don’t like everything I know about myself, and I’ll never be satisfied, but nobody’s perfect. I’m not sure where the next years will take me - what they will hold - but I’m open to suggestions.

Half of life’s problems disappear when one’s head is healthy.

To fly as fast as thought, you must begin by knowing that you have already arrived.

His attention span was not long, shall we say?

If there was one thing I had never been, it was mysterious, and if there was one thing I had never done, it was not talk.

...to her all books were the same and, as with her subjects, she felt a duty to approach them without prejudice...Lauren Bacall, Winifred Holtby, Sylvia Plath - who were they? Only be reading could she find out.

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.

Let's face it: I want it all--just like you and everybody else. It may not be in the cards, but the prospect is so dazzling that I have to try.

Childhood anxieties, childhood fears, never disappear entirely. They fade, but not away.

[Lauren Bacall] and Bogie seemed to have the most enormous opinion of each other's charms, and when they fought it was with the utter confidence of two cats locked deliciously in the same cage.

I'd like to meet the man who decided that people do or don't look Jewish. What the hell does that mean anyway? Is it the American penchant for pinning things down, catergorizing, for pigeonholing people? Whatever it is, it's wrong.

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

I believe in the truth, and I believe in saying what you think. Why not? Do you have to go around whispering all the time or playing a game with people? I just don’t believe in that. So I’m not the most adored person on the face of the earth. You have to know this. There are a lot of people who don’t like me at all, I’m very sure of that. But I wasn’t put on earth to be liked. I have my own reasons for being and my own sense of what is important and what isn’t, and I’m not going to change that.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

best Hitchcock films not made by Hitchcock. Here we go: Le Boucher, the early Claude Chabrol that Hitch, according to lore, wished he’d directed. Dark Passage, with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall—a San Francisco valentine, all velveteen with fog, and antecedent to any movie in which a character goes under the knife to disguise himself. Niagara, starring Marilyn Monroe; Charade, starring Audrey Hepburn; Sudden Fear!, starring Joan Crawford’s eyebrows. Wait Until Dark: Hepburn again, a blind woman stranded in her basement apartment. I’d go berserk in a basement apartment.

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.

Double Indemnity, Gaslight, Saboteur, The Big Clock . . . We lived in monochrome those nights. For me, it was a chance to revisit old friends; for Ed, it was an opportunity to make new ones. And we’d make lists. The Thin Man franchise, ranked from best (the original) to worst (Song of the Thin Man). Top movies from the bumper crop of 1944. Joseph Cotten’s finest moments. I can do lists on my own, of course. For instance: best Hitchcock films not made by Hitchcock. Here we go: Le Boucher, the early Claude Chabrol that Hitch, according to lore, wished he’d directed. Dark Passage, with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall—a San Francisco valentine, all velveteen with fog, and antecedent to any movie in which a character goes under the knife to disguise himself. Niagara, starring Marilyn Monroe; Charade, starring Audrey Hepburn; Sudden Fear!, starring Joan Crawford’s eyebrows. Wait Until Dark: Hepburn again, a blind woman stranded in her basement apartment. I’d go berserk in a basement apartment.

Lilies used to be a movie theatre, before. Students went there a lot; every spring they had a Humphrey Bogart festival, with Lauren Bacall or Katherine Hepburn, women on their own, making up their minds. They wore blouses with buttons down the front that suggested the possibilities of the word 'undone'. These women could not be undone; or not. They seemed to be able to choose.

Memory is a very unreliable organ. It's right up there with the penis.

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

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

Goodbye Kid. Hurry back. – Humphrey Bogart, last words to Lauren Bacall as she briefly left his bedside before his death.

That voice that talks badly to you is a demon voice. This very patient and determined demon shows up in your bedroom one day and refuses to leave. You are six or twelve or fifteen and you look in the mirror and you hear a voice so awful and mean that it takes your breath away. It tells you that you are fat and ugly and you don’t deserve love. And the scary part is the demon is your own voice. But it doesn’t sound like you. It sounds like a strangled and seductive version of you. Think Darth Vader or an angry Lauren Bacall. The good news is there are ways to make it stop talking. The bad news is it never goes away. If you are lucky, you can live a life where the demon is generally forgotten, relegated to a back shelf in a closet next to your old field hockey equipment. You may even have days or years when you think the demon is gone. But it is not. It is sitting very quietly, waiting for you. This motherfucker is patient. It says, “Take your time.” It says, “Go fall in love and exercise and surround yourself with people who make you feel beautiful.” It says, “Don’t worry, I’ll wait.” And then one day, you go through a breakup or you can’t lose your baby weight or you look at your reflection in a soup spoon and that slimy bugger is back. It moves its sour mouth up to your ear and reminds you that you are fat and ugly and don’t deserve love. This demon is some Stephen King from-the-sewer devil-level shit.

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

She felt that she was channelling Lauren Bacall in the 1940s. Her hair, swept to the side with light curls at the end added to the look, as did her pearl brooch. With the 40s on her mind, she thought of authors from the era, and made a mental note to read Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn when she next had the chance. Perhaps it’s time to change era for a while, she thought, feeling excited.

Le Boucher, the early Claude Chabrol that Hitch, according to lore, wished he’d directed. Dark Passage, with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall—a San Francisco valentine, all velveteen with fog, and antecedent to any movie in which a character goes under the knife to disguise himself. Niagara, starring Marilyn Monroe; Charade, starring Audrey Hepburn; Sudden Fear!, starring Joan Crawford’s eyebrows. Wait Until Dark: Hepburn again, a blind woman stranded in her basement apartment. I’d go berserk in a basement apartment. Now, movies that postdate Hitch: The Vanishing, with its sucker-punch finale. Frantic, Polanski’s ode to the master. Side Effects, which begins as a Big Pharma screed before slithering like an eel into another genre altogether. Okay. Popular film misquotes. “Play it again, Sam”: Casablanca, allegedly, except neither Bogie nor Bergman ever said it. “He’s alive”: Frankenstein doesn’t gender his monster; cruelly, it’s just “It’s alive.” “Elementary, my dear Watson” does crop up in the first Holmes film of the talkie era, but appears nowhere in the Conan Doyle canon.

Stop for a moment and ponder on the silliness of it. You spend a good part of your adult life acquiring things, building a home, filling it with objects that please your eye and make you feel comfortable. Then you spend the last part of your life trying to figure out how to get rid of it all.

I believe in the truth, and I belive in saying what you think. Why not? Do you have to go around whispering all the time or playing a game with people? I just don't believe in that. So I'm not the most adored person on the face of the earth... There are a lot of people who don't like me at all, I'm very sure of that. But I wasn't put on earth to be liked. I have my own reasons for being and my own sense of what is important and what isn't, and I'm not going to change that.

In his book, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, Viet Thanh Nguyen writes that immigrant communities like San Jose or Little Saigon in Orange County are examples of purposeful forgetting through the promise of capitalism: “The more wealth minorities amass, the more property they buy, the more clout they accumulate, and the more visible they become, the more other Americans will positively recognize and remember them. Belonging would substitute for longing; membership would make up for disremembering.” One literal example of this lies in the very existence of San Francisco’s Chinatown. Chinese immigrants in California had battled severe anti-Chinese sentiment in the late 1800s. In 1871, eighteen Chinese immigrants were murdered and lynched in Los Angeles. In 1877, an “anti-Coolie” mob burned and ransacked San Francisco’s Chinatown, and murdered four Chinese men. SF’s Chinatown was dealt its final blow during the 1906 earthquake, when San Francisco fire departments dedicated their resources to wealthier areas and dynamited Chinatown in order to stop the fire’s spread. When it came time to rebuild, a local businessman named Look Tin Eli hired T. Paterson Ross, a Scottish architect who had never been to China, to rebuild the neighborhood. Ross drew inspiration from centuries-old photographs of China and ancient religious motifs. Fancy restaurants were built with elaborate teak furniture and ivory carvings, complete with burlesque shows with beautiful Asian women that were later depicted in the musical Flower Drum Song. The idea was to create an exoticized “Oriental Disneyland” which would draw in tourists, elevating the image of Chinese people in America. It worked. Celebrities like Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Ronald Reagan and Bing Crosby started frequenting Chinatown’s restaurants and nightclubs. People went from seeing Chinese people as coolies who stole jobs to fetishizing them as alluring, mysterious foreigners. We paid a price for this safety, though—somewhere along the way, Chinese Americans’ self-identity was colored by this fetishized view. San Francisco’s Chinatown was the only image of China I had growing up. I was surprised to learn, in my early twenties, that roofs in China were not, in fact, covered with thick green tiles and dragons. I felt betrayed—as if I was tricked into forgetting myself. Which is why Do asks his students to collect family histories from their parents, in an effort to remember. His methodology is a clever one. “I encourage them and say, look, if you tell your parents that this is an academic project, you have to do it or you’re going to fail my class—then they’re more likely to cooperate. But simultaneously, also know that there are certain things they won’t talk about. But nevertheless, you can fill in the gaps.” He’ll even teach his students to ask distanced questions such as “How many people were on your boat when you left Vietnam? How many made it?” If there were one hundred and fifty at the beginning of the journey and fifty at the end, students may never fully know the specifics of their parents’ trauma but they can infer shadows of the grief they must hold.

Imagination is the highest kite one can fly. -- Lauren Bacall

In The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, David Thomson argues that Brennan should have won awards for even better performances in To Have and Have Not (1944), My Darling Clementine (1946), Red River (1948), The Far Country (1955), and Rio Bravo (1959). Thomson counts no less than twenty-eight high caliber Brennan performances in still more films, including These Three (1936), Fury (1936), Meet John Doe (1941), and Bad Day At Black Rock (1955). Brennan worked with Hollywood’s greatest directors—John Ford, Howard Hawks, William Wyler, King Vidor, and Fritz Lang—while also starring in Jean Renoir’s Hollywood directorial debut, Swamp Water (1941). To discuss Brennan’s greatest performances is also to comment on the work of Gary Cooper, Henry Fonda, Dana Andrews, Spencer Tracy, John Wayne, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Anne Baxter, Barbara Stanwyck, Lana Turner, Linda Darnell, Ginger Rogers, Loretta Young, and many other stars.

I’m so sorry we were late,” she was apologizing in her Lauren Bacall gracious woman mode, the one that always made people accept her apology. “John wasn’t sure until the last minute whether he felt like coming or not. But I did so want to meet Aurora’s new neighbors, and it was so kind of you to invite us…

Unfriendly’ witnesses and those who opposed the hearings, such as John Huston, Katharine Hepburn, Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart, were vilified.

You don't always win your battles, but it's good to know you fought.

Lauren Bacall stands

For seven rooms with two baths and three fireplaces, a typical price was $45,000. Lauren Bacall’s fourth-floor spread facing the Park was priced at $53,340. The smallest flats—one-bedroom, one-bath, nonhousekeeping units that had been guest rooms on the second floor—were priced at $4,410.

Kirk Douglas had engineered his social life with the cynical goal of meeting the rich and powerful, he would have ignored this Lauren Bacall. But so cynical and narrow-focused an approach isn’t likely to produce good luck. The lucky personality gets to know everybody in sight: the rich and the poor, the famous the humble, the sociable and even the friendless and the cranky.

Bogie did not believe in in-laws living with husband and wife, and he didn’t believe in anyone dropping in, relatives, even mothers, included. His rule was absolute: Call before and wait for an invitation. His home was sacred, and privacy to be respected.

And making a fool of yourself is something all actors have to risk doing. That’s part of our business. And that too is not the end of the world, though it can seem so at the time

He leaned in and pretended to examine every counter of my face, as though he were Lauren Bacall and I was Humphrey Bogart from Dark Passage. Then he pulled back and did a comical double-take like Cary Grant in My Favorite Wife.