“All you have to do is say, ‘I’m going home,’ and you’re the most popular girl at the party.”
― Elaine Stritch
“There will always be ladies who lunch. Always. And apparently they live a long time.”
― Elaine Stritch
“I always say, ‘If you can’t give a reason for the banana peel being in the alley, then don’t have the comic slide over it.’ Do you understand what I mean? First explain how the banana peel got there quickly. And then there’s a reason for all the comedy.”
― Elaine Stritch
“I can’t explain chemistry. I really can’t. I haven’t got a clue what it’s all about. It just happens. It’s like falling in love. You can’t explain why you fall in love or explain why it’s this particular person.”
― Elaine Stritch
“My idea of serenity – that wonderful word that everybody’s trying to get into their life – is call-waiting.”
― Elaine Stritch
“I mention I’m going home, and I’m a star immediately! This used to happen with my boyfriends – as soon as I’d say, ‘I gotta go home now,’ they fell in love.”
― Elaine Stritch
“I’m funny when I want to be. And I’m even funny when I don’t want to be.”
― Elaine Stritch
“You have to be very, very good looking to get ahead in motion pictures.”
― Elaine Stritch
“I am not influenced by other human beings. But I am inspired.”
― Elaine Stritch
“This age thing is all up to you. It’s like happiness is up to you. You just have to understand what it is before you get it.”
― Elaine Stritch
“Talent is seductive.”
― Elaine Stritch
“If I see a great performance on television, onstage, in the movies, I go to work the next day with a renewed energy and less fear. These great artists take me out of my life and make me want to go there.”
― Elaine Stritch
“There’s something that really frightens me – and that’s fear.”
― Elaine Stritch
“I’m a hotel baby, absolutely: it’s hard to think of a hotel I haven’t stayed in.”
― Elaine Stritch
“I think it’s the wrong way around to say, ‘When you get older move to the country.’ I think when you get older you move to New York.”
― Elaine Stritch
“I care about money, very much. I want it. I don’t ever want to be without it. My mother once said about me, ‘Elaine has to have money.’”
― Elaine Stritch
“When I want to do something badly enough, I do it, but there is a practical side of me that thinks I should be paid fairly.”
― Elaine Stritch
“What I want to understand is what I am talking about on the stage. What I don’t want to understand is what the government is talking about when the government tells me about taxes.”
― Elaine Stritch
“I never found anyone who could look after me as well as I could look after myself.”
― Elaine Stritch
“Diabetes is a lousy, lousy disease.”
― Elaine Stritch
“I think the most interesting New Yorkers are the people who were not born here.”
― Elaine Stritch
“I do believe in the infallibility of the Pope, because I think we have to believe in something.”
― Elaine Stritch
“I love reviews. Anybody who tells you they don’t read reviews is a liar.”
― Elaine Stritch
“For me, going to London is like coming home. In fact, I’ve often entertained the idea of ending my days there.”
― Elaine Stritch
“As a diabetic, I’m a walking picnic. I have to eat measured amounts of food at certain times.”
― Elaine Stritch
“The closer a part is to you, the harder it is to play. Anything else is just imitation. If I’m playing a Russian countess, I get the hat, the accent, the outrageousness. Easy. Playing a murderess? Perfect.”
― Elaine Stritch
“I don’t wear a wig. I’d feel terrible onstage with a wig. I hate to be so ‘Actors Studio’-ish, but I like to feel it’s me out there.”
― Elaine Stritch
“I have no intention of retiring. Even my blood sugar is better when I’m working.”
― Elaine Stritch
“I tell the truth, and it has gotten me into a lot of trouble. My dad used to say to me, ‘If you tell the truth all day long, you will end up in jail.’”
― Elaine Stritch
“I have not had any of that surgical stuff. I am too curious to find out exactly how I progress every day of my life naturally. That is what fascinates me.”
― Elaine Stritch
“Fear is the base of what everybody does wrong in their lives.”
― Elaine Stritch
“My movie career – if such a thing even exists – is laughable.”
― Elaine Stritch
“Why haven’t I made more movies? Nobody asked me.”
― Elaine Stritch
“I don’t think there’s any thrill in the world like doing work you’re good at.”
― Elaine Stritch
“Certain type of actresses get younger instead of older. I always say, ‘Only ingenues age.’”
― Elaine Stritch
“When I’m playing comedy, it is such a crap shoot of what will work and what won’t.”
― Elaine Stritch
“You cannot tell an audience a lie. They know it before you do; before it’s out of your mouth, they know it’s a lie.”
― Elaine Stritch
“I don’t want to see a movie twice. I don’t want to do anything twice.”
― Elaine Stritch
“Audiences are not strangers to me. They’re the best friends I’ve got in my life.”
― Elaine Stritch
“All of the writing on ’30 Rock’ is a joy to go into. It’s pretty hot stuff.”
― Elaine Stritch
“I don’t have a great talent for explaining myself in acting because I can’t explain it.”
― Elaine Stritch
“Making clever speeches takes a lot of work and a lot of time.”
― Elaine Stritch
“I like being talked about. I think some people really don’t… because they’re secure enough and they don’t need that.”
― Elaine Stritch
“I love Birmingham, Michigan. It’s lovely – you know, it’s very similar to the Hamptons.”
― Elaine Stritch
“The people in New York – their humor is on a level that goes, uh, very deep, you know?”
― Elaine Stritch
“I don’t have to go to a doctor and have my face changed. It terrifies me that women do that.”
― Elaine Stritch
“I’m a good acting partner for me… when I don’t have anyone else, I do really well!”
― Elaine Stritch
“I love holidays in New York. I love ’em. I want to celebrate something all the time, and New York has holidays for every day of the week, practically. I like holidays in New York City.”
― Elaine Stritch
“You never know what is happening to yourself when it is happening.”
― Elaine Stritch
“I could have made a lot of money doing ‘Golden Girls,’ and I would have been good. But the image of it! And for me to work with Betty White every day would be like taking cyanide.”
― Elaine Stritch
“Talent is very dangerous. It alienates people.”
― Elaine Stritch
“Betty White is probably a very nice woman.”
― Elaine Stritch
“I find it easier to abstain than do a little bit of anything. I’m not a ‘little bit’ kind of dame. I want it all, whatever I do.”
― Elaine Stritch
“New Yorkers stop me on the street all the time to say, ‘You’re terrific! You’re the nuts!’”
― Elaine Stritch
“Let me tell you about those convents. All that crap about extending the pinkie finger while sipping tea is a myth. Convent schools are breeding grounds for great broads and occasionally one-of-the-boys. Convent schools teach you to play against everything, which is what I’m still doing.”
― Elaine Stritch
“These performers that go on about their technique and craft – oh, puleeze! How boring! I don’t know what ‘technique’ means. But I do know what experience is.”
― Elaine Stritch
“There’s certainly nothing lasting and definite about the theater.”
― Elaine Stritch
“You can’t be funny unless you’re tragic, and you can’t be tragic unless you’re funny.”
― Elaine Stritch
“I compare Stephen Sondheim with humor, because humor is unanalyzable. You can’t analyze humor. You just have to get through it.”
― Elaine Stritch
“Honestly, this is a big thing to say, but I don’t think I’ve ever been bored. If I even get an inkling of it, I split.”
― Elaine Stritch
“I think being boring is just the worst sin of all time.”
― Elaine Stritch
“Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.”
― Elaine Stritch
“I never thought about living in New York. I just thought it was great.”
― Elaine Stritch
“I don’t want to see my family all the time, and they’re delighted, I’m sure, to be aware of that.”
― Elaine Stritch
“Quite frankly I don’t know how to be happy. I have not a clue.”
― Elaine Stritch
“I just serve others through entertaining. That’s when I am happy.”
― Elaine Stritch
“There are a lot of things I do that I don’t want to, but I have to. It’s truly an emotional need for me to perform.”
― Elaine Stritch
“There’s something about it that makes sense, Lent. You give something up, and everything’s more joyful.”
― Elaine Stritch
“Isn’t this fantastic, what a star I am?”
― Elaine Stritch
“I don’t think I’m gonna die tomorrow or even two weeks from now, or even ever. I just don’t know – who the hell knows what’s gonna happen to them? Nobody! Isn’t that comforting? Nobody has a clue. I like that we don’t know. And I like that it’s somebody else’s decision, not mine.”
― Elaine Stritch
“My biggest dream was to get out of Michigan – to discover life beyond the Sacred Heart Convent.”
― Elaine Stritch
“I like celebrities. I love people who are famous. Always have.”
― Elaine Stritch
“I like glasses so I can go out without my makeup. Just grab your coat and get your hat and go.”
― Elaine Stritch
“When the hospital sends for me, when the ambulance comes and I ease my way out of the world, I’d rather be in Detroit, Michigan, than Lenox Hill.”
― Elaine Stritch
“I love New York. I went to New York to become an actress, and I did it. And I won all the awards known to man. And I’m happy. And I came home. I came, I saw, I conquered. And it feels great.”
― Elaine Stritch
“I’m loaded with talent.”
― Elaine Stritch
“I loved being on Broadway, but performing has become exhausting, and I just don’t want to live in New York anymore. I’m just sick of the competition in New York, the feeling that I always have to rehearse to keep up my performance. I don’t feel like rehearsing, even though it should be my favorite thing in the world to do.”
― Elaine Stritch
“I smoked, I drank, I did all the kicking my heels up type things, but I went to Mass on Sunday.”
― Elaine Stritch
“If I see someone saying the rosary in the wings, I know they’ve got talent.”
― Elaine Stritch
“I love audiences. My God, the best friends in the world!”
― Elaine Stritch
“I think I have more humour in me than anger. But those two things are great bed-fellows, performance-wise.”
― Elaine Stritch
“There were a lot of lyrics that I sang but didn’t understand. But I had this facade in performance of looking like I wrote the book.”
― Elaine Stritch
“I think taking care of yourself, health-wise, in every way, is a 100 percent winner.”
― Elaine Stritch
“Fans recognize me all over the place. But the second you need anything, they’re never around! They’re like the police!”
― Elaine Stritch
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