Shirley MacLaine Quotations

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

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

You know when you eat too many sweets and get diabetes? Paparazzi are the diabetes of materialistic culture.

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

I don't do like diva trips and stuff.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

I'm a peaceful person once work ethic is established.

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

For me, the safest place is out on a limb.

Of course I'm schooled in the old school method: taking what I think the director wants, then reworking it through my own brain and heart.

I love the idea that I'm the oldest one in the room because I can get away with anything!

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

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.

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

I've been through so much of my own self-search that I'm not as consumed with who I am as I used to be.

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

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.

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.

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

I think male actors get confused by their own vanity.

I think we plan everything, somehow, on another level.

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

Things are done according to money these days.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

My mother was Canadian, so you never knew what she was thinking.

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

I don't know why anybody would be in awe of me.

I don't like leaving my dog when I go to England and she is with me all the time.

I don't think you go out of style when you're living in the present most of the time. And I think that is what I do.

I never would have given up my work to stay home.

I was afraid I would get the Oscar for 'Irma La Douce' because it was popular. But I didn't want to because I didn't really think it was that good.

It's a big deal for me to say I'm over politics.

Maybe I'm a dream artist, as they call it.

Of course, we're all a mass of contradictions.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I was so appalled. They were kind of waiting for Terry to walk out and perhaps take a poop or something, because she's famous herself, and what would I do about the poop? And would they make me mad? Because the whole point is, they want to make you mad, and then they get a good picture.

He's fine. He had a good time tonight.

I think that families are the most important lesson we can learn from and in, and I haven't seen many pictures lately that have to do with the search for who we are and identity,

I think he really doesn't know. What's he doing with a women's picture, anyway?

When she was a kid don't you love it?

The studios don't make stars. Great movies, great scripts make stars. I never had a chance to grow through my roles, I never had an acting class in my life. What the studios had were visionaries who cared about the movies, about making good movies.

They didn't even tell me about that. I found out the next day on set, ... They didn't even tell (co-star) Kevin Costner, either.

It was definitely a great experience, ... All that work and all the long hours are paying off.

That's the best I've had all year! ... God, I'd love to get drunk with you!

They would say, 'What are YOU eating?' ... And that's what they wanted. They said, 'We want to eat what you're eating.'

I love having my butt kissed by you. That's the best I've had in 10 years!

I knew that her canvas was deeper than she had allowed herself to be, ... Something About Mary and Charlie's Angels? Come on. This is bigger. And she was very courageous in my opinion and disciplined. Quite disciplined for someone that the public considers ditzy.

I guess Britney and the dancer didn't show up that day,

I love playing contained. I'm going to pattern the rest of my career after Morgan Freeman.

I don't know. It just happens and you love your work and you love your profession, you stay there and you will find each other.

because he says what he actually would do. But he's got no chance.

He's an expert filmmaker, and he's an ex-journalist, so he really knows how to investigate what people are feeling, ... And I found it fascinating that he wanted to go into something that dealt with women's feelings.

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

All those ghosts were hanging around. ... If I had been them, I would have gone to work,

I loved the idea of doing a love story with people over the age of 60 and a film that will hopefully give so many of the audience a chance to see themselves on the screen.

I think it's much more important to know the truth than it is to make money on it.

What we live with is ourselves. And when you have your own identity you are much easier to live with.

Sometimes I feel an impingement of something I went through in another lifetime. But I like to concentrate on the absolute present. That's why I love my animals. They live in the present.

Sometimes people who have their lives played out in public don't feel they have the privacy to continually journey within. I did, and that's why I have longevity.

The uninvestigated life is not worth living. I don't want to live that way.

People think I'm nuts.

And I think we'll be able to prove scientifically that other talents such as intuitive, psychic, clairvoyant and audiovoyant are very real.

My first few weeks in New York were an initiation into the kingdom of guts.

You let the energy go wherever it wants. I have such a rich spiritual life. Most people take drugs to experience that.

Ballet is the repetitive training of the body for the purpose of executing steps in traditional fashion. It is tied to and bound by the past. It is a disciplined beauty consciously preserved in the image of the old days in societies that were class-conscious and appreciative of elitist physical expertise.

I simply channeled a character, this time I allowed the character to inhabit me.

Acupuncturists Chiropractors Massage Therapists Dentists and more!

If I had a party to attend and didn't want to be there, I would play the part of someone who was having a lovely time.

On the stage you try to act real. On the screen you try to be real.

We humans should never forget our capacity to connect with the collective spirit of animals. Their energy is essential to our future growth.

Being a dancer meant you nearly always thought about food.

Maybe the tragedy of the human race was that we had forgotten that we are each divine.

On things she had to pack before leaving her home in advance of a forest fire, 1996. Childhood pictures and pictures of my life. Do you know how many pictures that is? Not just this life; I have pictures from 13,000 lives.

Someday change will be accepted as life itself.

You can't take a crash course in serenity.