Quotes from Lauren Bacall

We live in an age of mediocrity.

I wasn't brought up as a society girl to go to balls and be a debutante and marry the social set and money and go to parties. No one in my family lived like that. And I never wanted to live like that. I was brought up to believe in work. I always wanted a career. Always.

That was my original dream, anyway, to be on stage. I think the stage is an actor's place because actors, it belongs to you.

If I could have lived as an actress in any period, it would have been the 1920s - I would have loved to have been part of that speakeasy era.

All the Warner actors were real actors. They started in theater and led very straightforward lives - you never saw entourages around. The MGM girls were the glamour girls, and they always had the makeup and hair people with them and all that.

I don't sit around thinking that I'd like to have another husband; only another man would make me think that way.

Isn't hope an incredible, a wonderfully demented thing?

It's inappropriate and vulgar and absolutely unacceptable to use your private life to sell anything commercially, but I think it's kind of a sickness.

I fairly often have thought how lucky I was. I knew everybody because I was married to Bogie, and that 25-year difference was the most fantastic thing for me to have in my life.

I put my career in second place throughout both my marriages and it suffered. I don't regret it. You make choices. If you want a good marriage, you must pay attention to that. If you want to be independent, go ahead. You can't have it all.

Each time a friend dies, the present becomes the past, in an instant.

I hope I'm thought of as not just a showbiz personality, but as someone who has lived a life and who has hopefully made a contribution to something along the way - someone who is a human being as well as an actress.