“Where did I do well?” When I did this assessment of my life, I said to myself, “It was really good.””

The [film] business is run by men, and they’re basically interested in their own species, and they’re not so interested in women belonging to the human race.

After thirty, a body has a mind of its own.

If somebody makes me laugh, I’m his slave for life.

I believe that Judy Garland’s artistry was so fine. I mean, when people say: ‘oh, she brought so much of her life to her music’, I don’t really believe that. I believe that she didn’t have to. She just was a moving human being. That was her gift.

I try not to drink too much because when I’m drunk, I bite.

I love nature, in spite of what it did to me.

If you pick up a ukulele, it will make you unbelievably happy.

Most people are walking around the city like corpses; they aren’t alive enough to notice the trash. They come from other places and they see it as a big garbage dump.

Find your Light; They can’t love you if they can’t see you

I hope to keep entertaining in some way until I can’t physically entertain any longer. It’s what I was born to do, and I love this profession.

One of my first role models was Eugene Lang, a wealthy businessman who went back to his elementary school in East Harlem and addressed the sixth-grade class. He looked out at that sea of faces and said, “If any of you wants to go to college, I will pay for it.”

The inventor of the modern foundation garment that we women wear today was a German scientist and opera lover by the name of Otto Titsling.

There’s the media-driven universe, in which the public perceives you in a superficial way. Then there’s the universe that you actually inhabit, where you have to get up even if you didn’t sleep so well, and you feel like crap and your face is swollen.

I loved the photographs of people wearing elaborate makeup and costumes – they really pulled at me inside. I was in that library every week for years, until I was about 13. I had a rich interior life, because I didn’t have much of a social life.

People are not the best because they work hard. They work hard because they are the best.

The worst part of success is to try to find someone who is happy for you.