86 Lily Tomlin Quotes

Lily Tomlin quotes

1. I've seen these women all my life, I know how they walk, I know how they talk...

2. Truth is, I've always been selling out. The difference is that in the past, I looked like I had integrity because there were no buyers.

3. There's so much plastic in this culture that vinyl leopard skin is becoming an endangered synthetic.

4. What if it's boring... or if it's not boring, it might be too revealing, or worse, it might be too revealing and still be boring.

5. I have always felt that humor was a wonderful vehicle to let us become connected with each other and ourselves: I try to portray the similarities and polarities in men and women, so that we can acknowledge and embrace our collective consciousness.

6. If you can't be direct, why be?

7. I feel some part of me can wake up and be very existential and the next day wake up and be sort of in love with the universe.

8. When you talk about yourself for 35 years, first of all, it gets repetitious. And then it seems a little bit excessive, at the least.

9. People think there's some real subversive thing playing against whoever it is; a lot of it is just people who want to go along and get along. And they also want to make money. And the bottom line is, they're going to put out as much stuff as they can - stupid, banal stuff that makes money.

10. The larger picture is really to swing people's awareness of what really is moral. ... There are great clergy-people who absolutely do not agree with this. It's not whether God is on our side or whether we're doing God's will, it's being so narcissistic as to think that God is telling you what to do.

11. We went to a Southern Baptist church. When I was a small child, until I was about 8 or 9 years old, I worried if I didn't go forward and get saved every Sunday - which I couldn't do, it was absolutely too humiliating to see these adults flailing and beating their breasts and sobbing, and I thought, Oh, my God, this is so ridiculous, so embarrassing - I could never bring myself to go forward. And I'd think, Oh, my God, if I don't go next Sunday, if the end of the world comes, I'll go to hell. And that's is a pretty hard thing for a 7- or 8-year-old to carry all the time

12. The point I want to make is, the idea that people will say - out of the 170,000 people or however many were killed in the tsunami - they'll say, 'God saved me.' As if God particularly saved this person. There's a tremendous amount of narcissism in that belief, that God is speaking directly to you. I mean, it's unbelievable. ... All these disparate opinions and points of view that people say they're getting as direct divine guidance - I've been concerned for decades about presidents who claim to be born again. And knowing that everyone I knew in the fundamentalist church or in the evangelical Christian church - they wanted the rapture to come. ... We don't have to save the environment, because we're not going to be around.

13. 9 to 5 made people aware of equal pay for equal work. It hasn't really happened, but it has come closer. We're aware of sexual harassment, and of course, there are very few companies that have daycare centers, which seems to me would be the most humane, positive thing to do for a worker. The worker would be more loyal, they'd be more productive. It's so crazy not to do the human thing. It seems to me to be much more profitable to do the human thing. It just makes a better society.

14. Jane took me to another level because she's truly a wonderful writer. I'd put things together in the past and struggled with them. And then I met Jane. ... I was doing my Edith Ann album in '71 - the album came out in '72. She'd done a thing on television called J.T. - it was about a kid in Harlem - and she won a Peabody for it. I later learned it was the first thing she'd ever written. It was written as an After School Special, but they played it in prime time - and they played it every year after that for about 25 years, or something. Anyway, I saw it and it was wonderful. It was poetic and sensitive and satiric and tender and funny and so many things compressed into this one hour. And I thought, 'Oh, God, this is exactly what I want in a monologue.' So I wrote Jane and asked her to help me do the Edith Ann album. I didn't hear from her for a while. Then, suddenly, about a week before I was supposed to go in and record, she sent me a lot of material. I persuaded her to come to California and help me produce it. Frankly, I was pretty taken with her as soon as I saw her. We just sort of clicked. We became a couple right away.

15. I respect her talent and her brain and who she is as a person - and that kind of admiration and respect is a big factor in binding someone in a relationship. I know what a good heart she has, and how empathetic she is with all kinds of people and issues - she's so brilliant on top of it that she can voice these things. And she's as funny as she can possibly be. She makes me laugh.

16. Some journalists are just motivated by their own sense of what they want to say or what they feel comfortable saying or writing about. In '77, I was on the cover of Time. The same week I had a big story in Newsweek. In one of the magazines it says I live alone, and the other magazine said I live with Jane Wagner. Unless you were so really adamantly out, and had made some declaration at some press conference, people back then didn't write about your relationship.

17. Listen, I have no judgment about anything. Some people will bring certain celebrities up to me who are presumably - or known to be - gay and ask 'Why don't they come out?' But we don't know why they don't, and it's none of our business, really. In '75 I was making the Modern Scream album, and Jane and I were in the studio. My publicist called me and said 'Time will give you the cover if you'll come out.' I was more offended than anything that they thought we'd make a deal. But that was '75 - it would have been a hard thing to do at that time.

18. It's a more ridiculing, divisive humor today, especially with the advent of political incorrectness, which is a license to be as ridiculing and awful about certain groups... There should be room for everybody, absolutely, and then the culture is going to decide the prevailing weight. We can't decide it individually. Nobody is here without a reason. ... I always had a different sensibility. I like a huge range of comedy - from broad and farcical, the most sensitive, the most understated - but I always wanted my comedy to be more embracing of the species rather than debasing of it.

19. Don't be afraid of missing opportunities. Behind every failure is an opportunity somebody wishes they had missed.

20. For fast acting relief, try slowing down.

21. If love is the answer, could you please rephrase the question?

22. If the formula for water is H2O, is the formula for an ice cube H2O squared?

23. If truth is beauty, how come no one has their hair done in the library?

24. If you read a lot of books, you're considered well-read. But if you watch a lot of TV, you're not considered well-viewed.

25. Sometimes I worry about being a success in a mediocre world.

26. The best mind-altering drug is truth.

27. The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat.

28. Why is it when we talk to God we're said to be praying - but when God talks to us, we're said to be schizophrenic?

29. Interviewer: You once said you had a drug problem... Lily: Yeah, I still do. It's so hard to find good grass these days.

30. Reality is nothing but a collective hunch.

31. Reality is the leading cause of stress amongst those in touch with it....

32. Reality is a crutch for people who can't cope with drugs.

33. When you're dancing the mystical dance of the molecules, you're not the one who's leading.

    Attribution disputed; shown as originally published.

34. It's my belief we developed language because of our deep inner need to complain.

35. All my life, I've always wanted to be somebody, but I see now I should have been more specific.

36. If I had known what it would be like to have it all... I might have been willing to settle for less.

37. Sometimes I feel like a figment of my own imagination.

38. No matter how cynical you become, it's never enough to keep up.

39. I bet the worst part about dying is the part where your whole life passes before you.

    Attribution disputed; shown as originally published.

40. Your problem is your role models were models.

41. I swear people don't want sex so much as they want somebody who'll listen to 'em ... the first thing you learn after fellatio is how to listen.

42. Remember we're all in this alone.

43. If evolution was worth its salt, it should've evolved something better than 'survival of the fittest.' I think a better idea would be 'survival of the wittiest.' At least, that way, creatures that didn't survive could've died laughing.

44. Wouldn't it be great if we all grew up to be what we wanted to be? The world would be full of nurses, firemen, and ballerinas.

45. Why isn't there a special name for the tops of your feet?

46. Forgiveness means giving up all hope for a better past.

47. I like a teacher who gives you something to take home to think about besides homework.

48. I may be schizophrenic, but I'll always have each other.

49. I never officially came out in any kind of really public way. I just always lived very simply and openly, but the press has never made a big fuss about me or said anything to me... In some ways I don't even identify myself in any kind of limited way. I don't want to. I wish none of us had to. I wish we were just people.

50. I worry that the person who thought up Muzak may be thinking up something else.

51. Ninety-eight percent of the adults in this country are decent, hardworking, honest Americans. It's the other lousy two percent that get all the publicity. But then - we elected them.

52. Thank God kids never mean well.

53. There will be sex after death; we just won't be able to feel it.

54. Things are going to get a lot worse before they get worse.

55. We have reason to believe that man first walked upright to free his hands for masturbation.

56. When I am happy I feel like crying, but when I am sad I don't feel like laughing. I think it is better to be happy; then you get two feelings for the price of one.

57. One ringy dingy... two ringy dingy.

58. Have I reached the party to whom I am speaking?

59. The phone company handles 84 billion calls a year, everything from kings, queens, and presidents to the scum of the earth.

60. How may I, in all humble servitude, be of assistance?

61. We're the phone company. We don't care; we don't have to.

62. What's that Mr. Veedle? Privileged information?... that's so cute.

63. You're dealing with the phone company, Mr. Veedle. We are not bound by city, state, or federal regulations. We are omnipotent.

64. You are not dealing with just anyone's fool. I am a high-school graduate.

65. Don't hang up. You've angered me, and when you anger me you anger the phone company and all the power necessary to tie up your lines for the next fifty years. Do I make myself clear?

66. Well Mr. Bush, it may be true that Mr. Kerry avoided being in a war, but at least he didn't start one.

1. I bought a box of animal crackers, but there was nothing inside. They'd eaten each other.

2. You know being relevant or coming up with something interesting, funny to say about what's current is just as hard as it might ever be depending on the serendipity of it all.

3. I wanted to be a stage actress. I wanted to be a New York actress and have a community with other actors. I didn't want to get famous; I always thought getting famous was a drag on you.

4. No matter how cynical I get, I can't keep up.

5. And yet humanity is so not evolved that how can you expect anything absolutely major to happen? Look how long, we move ahead in technology, how much do we move ahead in morality or emotion? We move ahead so minimally, minimally, minimally.

6. The whole idea of being in captivity in such limited space, especially in a zoo, causes elephants to suffer. They develop all kinds of foot diseases. They die. They get cysts. Not only is it painful, it eventually kills them.

7. Maybe if people started to listen, history would stop repeating itself.

8. I still believe that sex is dirty. It's just that now I wouldn't have it any other way.

9. I always wondered why somebody doesn't do something about that. Then I realized I was somebody.

10. We're giving jobs to people who would otherwise be out of work if we weren't exploiting cheap labor.

11. If life is so meaningless, then why are we always bringing it up?

12. Reality is a crutch for people who can't handle drugs.

13. There's nothing sadder than getting to the end of your life and saying, 'I didn't do it right'.

14. What goes up must come down. But don't expect it to come down where you can find it.

15. When we speak to God, we call it prayer; when God speaks back, we call it psychosis!

16. I guess if people couldn't profit from war I don't think there would be war.

17. We are people with lives, not consumers with lifestyles.

18. When we talk to god, it's prayer. When god talks to us, it's schizophrenia.

19. Creating characters is just another way to express a type and put that type to use.

20. You can't expect insights, even the big ones, to make you suddenly understand everything. But I figure: Hey it's a step in the right direction if they leave you confused in a deeper way.