“I cannot stand the people who get wonderful starts in show business and who abuse it. Lindsay Lohan and Charlie Sheen, for example, although there are plenty of others, too. They are the most blessed people in the world, and they don’t appreciate it.”

I have the backbone of an eel.

It’s been phenomenal, but everybody keeps congratulating me on my resurgence and my big comeback. I haven’t been away, guys. I’ve been working steadily for the last 63 years.

When we started in television, there was that magic box in the corner of the room, and ‘Oh my gosh – look what it’s doing!’

I really don’t care with whom you sleep. I just care what kind of a decent human being you are.

During the Depression, my dad made radios to sell to make extra money. Nobody had any money to buy the radios, so he would trade them for dogs. He built kennels in the backyard, and he cared for the dogs.

I stayed in show business to pay for my animal business.

The writers are the stars of every really successful sitcom.

A lady likes to be complimented on her looks, her eyes, her figure. But the personality comments are much appreciated.

I don’t get political.

I may be a senior, but so what? I’m still hot.

I have my golden retriever now, Pontiac. He’s a career-change guide dog from Guide Dogs for the Blind.

I just want to bring as much natural as I can. I’m not saying that people who take acting lessons are false. They’re much better than I am, but it doesn’t work for me.

I’m in the middle of my sixth book, which is about animals at the Los Angeles Zoo.

I’m a big cockeyed optimist. I try to accentuate the positive as opposed to the negative.

I am the luckiest old broad on two feet if the truth were known. It’s – but it all goes back to ‘Mary Tyler Moore,’ ‘Golden Girls,’ all those – actors love to take the credit. We couldn’t do it without the writers.

I don’t care who anybody sleeps with. If a couple has been together all that time – and there are gay relationships that are more solid than some heterosexual ones – I think it’s fine if they want to get married. I don’t know how people can get so anti-something.

Sometimes we are blessed with being able to choose the time, and the arena, and the manner of our revolution, but more usually we must do battle where we are standing.

Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken.

No one knows whether death may not be the greatest of all blessings for a man, yet men fear it as if they knew it was the greatest of evils.

He who loses his mother loses a pure soul who blesses and guards him constantly.

It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.

I know I’m blessed because yo’ stress is realer than anything I done been through.

Wealth does not bring goodness, but goodness brings wealth and every other blessing, both to the individual and to the state.

The feeling we catching, my love is a blessing.