Shirley MacLaine's Quotes

People think I'm nuts.

The comedy of class, played so straight, is a wonderful thing for an actor to sink their teeth into.

The mob taught me how to play gin rummy.

The more I've learned about me, the more I'm interested in others.

The person who knows how to laugh at himself will never cease to be amused.

The soul is everlasting, and its learning experience is lifetime after lifetime.

There are stars who are proficiently paranoid enough to hide what they really think. I can't.

Things are done according to money these days.

We need proof in our society.

Well, success does not mean doing well.

When you walk 10 hours, 11 hours a day by yourself, you are doing a walking meditation.

Women being pitted each other another in Hollywood is an old tactic, but it's not real at all.

You have to be talentedly insecure in order to be a good actress. And then it's the director's job to make you more miserable and get a good take.

You know, I think I had my first past life recall when I was 7.

I mean, no one asks beauty secrets of me, or 'What size do you wear?' or 'Who's your couturier?' They ask me about really deep things and I love that.

I can't advise any of the young ones, because I don't know what their background was, but I would suggest that anyone who wants to be famous more than anything - there's a real problem.

I mean, I'm just speaking of my own experiences and my own desires, and it's a kind of a childlike wonder that could really possibly speculate on other dimensions.

I think when I was in my early twenties and middle twenties I didn't even know I wasn't living up to my potential. A couple of friends told me I wasn't and told me to get my act together, and it made a huge impact on me.

I'd like to introduce someone who has just come into my life. I've admired him for 35 years. He's someone who represents integrity, honesty, art, and on top of that stuff I'm actually sleeping with him.

Remember, I come from such an excessively overdone, red-carpet place called Hollywood. So I'm used to people blowing up their success in ways that are far above and beyond the truth.

We've had so many lifetimes of different cultures and different religions and different points of view and different wars and different loves and different children.

When a child comes in, I believe that it's a 'multipersonhood,' and it knows it, its consciousness knows it, and it has a nuclei in the center of its consciousness that is the repository of all experience and all knowledge. And when you look in the eyes of your baby and you feel this sense that they are an old soul, I believe indeed they are.

When times are bad, people like to lose themselves in the sheer glamour of another period: beautiful wardrobes, magnificent meals served in elegant settings.

It's useless to hold a person to anything he says while he's in love, drunk, or running for office.

I don't need anyone to rectify my existence. The most profound relationship we will ever have is the one with ourselves.

Fear makes strangers of people who would be friends.

I want women to be liberated and still be able to have a nice ass and shake it.

If they would teach us from the time we're little to meditate and get in touch with all that our souls know, we wouldn't fight so much.

A person who knows how to laugh at himself will never ceased to be amused.

Don't be afraid to go out on a limb. It's where all the fruit is.

The best way to get husbands to do something is to suggest that perhaps they are too old to do it.

I think of life itself now as a wonderful play that I've written for myself, and so my purpose is to have the utmost fun playing my part.

I'm an artist, therefore I think I am sensitive to human pain.

Someday perhaps change will occur when times are ready for it instead of always when it is too late. Someday change will be accepted as life itself.

Women love working together. That's my experience anyway.

If anything interferes with my inner peace, I will walk away. Arguments with family members. All that stuff. None of it matters.

The more I traveled the more I realized that fear makes strangers of people who should be friends.

I'd like to go to another planet, which I might live long enough to accomplish. Just get on a spaceship and go. But not the moon. I don't see any flowers there. The moon is too close. I want to go further.

Well, when you're relaxed, your mind takes you to the whole reality. There's no such thing as time when you're really relaxed. That's why meditation works.

Being old is such a treat!

I don't have an assistant. I make a lot of people around me my slaves, but no assistant.

I look like a real bag lady when I go to Starbucks with my dog and get my chai.

I make my mistakes in public.

I think the hill one has to trudge in order to understand a man's baggage is more of a trek than I'd like to take right now.

I wasn't afraid of getting old, because I was never a great beauty.

I've made so many movies playing a hooker that they don't pay me in the regular way anymore. They leave it on the dresser.

Remember what people used to say about meditation? Now everyone is doing it.

Sex is hardly ever just about sex.

The only joy I had was writing what was. That book was. It no longer amuses me to be all the things I was when I wrote that. But it is my story as I was then.

Well, if I am not vulgar, neither is my book. I wrote myself. Suggestiveness is always vulgar. But truth never. My book is not even remotely suggestive. I call things by their names. That is all.

When I was three years old I was taken with my family to a little town in Western Minnesota, where I lived a more or less vapid and ordinary life until I was ten.

You may think me crude, and probably I am crude, but I am not so crude as I was, for I am clever enough to see that the girl of nineteen who thought herself a genius was only an unusual girl writing her heart out.

I want to write such things as compel the admiring acclamation of the world at large, such things as are written but once in years, things subtle but distinctly different from the books written every day.

I am a genius. Then it amused me to keep saying so, but now it does not. I expected to be happy sometime. Now I know I shall never be.

I was born to be alone, and I always shall be; but now I want to be.

Let me but make a beginning, let me but strike the world in a vulnerable spot, and I can take it by storm.

There is really no right and wrong. I recognize no right and wrong.

I never give my real self. I have a hundred sides, and I turn first one way and then the other. I am playing a deep game. I have a number of strong cards up my sleeve. I have never been myself, excepting to two friends.

I read of the Kalamazoo girl who killed herself after reading the book. I am not at all surprised. She lived in Kalamazoo, for one thing, and then she read the book.

Fame is indeed beautiful and benign and gentle and satisfying, but happiness is something at once tender and brilliant beyond all things.

I do not see any beauty in self-restraint.

I do not sing nor play, but I adore music, particularly Chopin. I like him because I cannot understand him.

I have never read a line of Walt Whitman.

I love devils.

I want fame more than I can tell. But more than I want fame I want happiness.

I want to live quietly.

I would rather be a fairly happy wife and mother.

I've never made plans for more than a day ahead.

It is with pain that I read of the dire effects of my book upon the minds of young girls.

Of poets I put Virgil first - he was greatest.

One must always say things that aim to interest, because in the world one must after all pay for one's keep.

The world is like a little marsh filled with mint and white hawthorn.

When I wrote my book I wanted to love someone. I wanted to be in love. Now I know that I shall never be in love - and I no longer wish to be.

Genius of a kind has always been with me; an empty heart that has taken on a certain wooden quality; an excellent, strong woman's body and a pitiably starved soul.