Shirley MacLaine Quotes

It's real important to enjoy your turn.

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

I'm too direct and too unsparingly impatient.

Crystals are amplifying minerals. You have a crystal in a radio - it amplifies the sound waves. You have a crystal in a television set - it amplifies the light waves. When you hold crystals, they amplify thought waves.

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

If you're comfortable with yourself-which everyone can get to, to some extent-that's when you start getting into who is your real self.

no one ever really leaves Hollywood. No one really leaves unless they are called away by God. Even then, the impulse would be to come back again and make a movie about the experience.

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

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

I have a lot of friends who come and stay, and we talk about the world.

I've always thought I was looking for myself whenever I traveled. Like a journey anywhere was really a journey through myself.

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.

Hollywood always had a streak of the totalitarian in just about everything it did. The old moguls were essentially hard-fisted authoritarians who had created a system of linked dictatorships to control the creative people. We were supposed to be the children; mad, tempestuous, brilliant, talented, not terribly smart children.

I think materialism has trumped a lot of stuff, but I don't think it has trumped the heart, especially when it comes to (a person's) last thought.

An actor has many lives and many people within him. I know there are lots of people inside me. No one ever said I'm dull.

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

I have never seen myself as leading for others. What's important is that I know who I am. Not completely. But I'm coming around third base.

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

I would say the biggest risk I always take is going in front of a live audience. There's nothing more risky to do. You have to really leave yourself open to your own authenticity, and you find that out pretty quick.

Aging people are underserved in this culture - big time. I want to stay healthy so I can serve that community and be a voice.

It is incredible, when you start believing in angels your life becomes a lot smoother.

I have a great life, to tell you the truth.

In terms of my life, I guess I want to share whatever I've learned really, which is basically one thing: know yourself, look for yourself, know what to look for, cherish it, be honest, be authentic, even if it hurts your feelings. That's not bad.

I think people will become more and more aware that we are all more than we seem.

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

Films and life are like clay, waiting for us to mold it. And when you trust your own insides and that becomes achievement, it's a kind of principle that seems to me is at work with everyone. God bless that principle. God bless that potential that we all have for making anything possible if we think we deserve it.

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

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

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 problem.

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.

He's a real gentleman. I bet he takes the dishes out of the sink before he pees in it.

I'm very involved with learning to be self-sufficient.

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'm very aware, but I'm very naïve. When you are really naïve and expecting safety and expecting the best, you don't feel you're taking risks. You can get smacked a little, but usually it works out pretty well. I would say that, as much as you can instill your open-minded naivety, if you're basically open minded, then you can do damn near anything.

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

Listen to sounds beyond silence.

I was always a character actress and never a sex symbol. Even when I was the leading lady, I was a character actor.

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.

The loss of magic is the denial of unlimited possibility.

He [Jimmy Carter] says his lust is in his heart. I hope it's a little lower.

Dwelling on the negative simply contributes to its power.

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.

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

The pickings are pretty slim when you have to play the part of a housewife who doesn't go out of her apartment because she's afraid she's going to get mugged, or a woman who turns into her brother, who is a murderer.

We are not victims of the world we see, we are victims of the way we see the world.

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

I've gotten crankier in my old age.

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.