Lucille Ball Quotes - Page 2

Luck? I don't know anything about luck. I've never banked on it and I'm afraid of people who do. Luck to me is something else: Hard work - and realizing what is opportunity and what isn't.

Knowing what you can not do is more important than knowing what you can do. In fact, that's good taste.

It's a helluva start, being able to recognize what makes you happy.

Here's what I advise any young struggling actress today: The important thing is to develop as a woman first, and a performer second. You wouldn't prostitute yourself to get a part, not if you're in the right mind. You won't be happy, whatever you do, unless you're comfortable with your own conscience.

Ability is of little account without opportunity.

Children internalize their parents' unhappiness. Fortunately, they absorb our contentment just as readily.

I don't suppose that hard work, discipline, and a perfectionist attitude toward my work did me any harm. They are a big part of my makeup today, as any of my co-workers will tell you. And when life seemed unbearable, I learned to live in my imagination, and to step inside other people's skins- indispensable abilities for an actress.

I am a real ham. I love an audience. I work better with an audience. I am dead, in fact, without one.

I hate failure and that divorce was a Number One failure in my eyes. It was the worst period of my life. Neither Desi nor I have been the same since, physically or mentally.

I am not funny. The writers were funny. My directors were funny. The situations were funny… What I am is brave. I have never been scared. Not when I did movies, certainly not when I was a model and not when I did I Love Lucy.

Some of the most gifted people I've ever met or read about are homosexual. How can you knock it?

Use a make-up table with everything close at hand and don't rush; otherwise you'll look like a patchwork quilt.

When you're too mad and too rattled to see straight, you're bound to make mistakes. You can't go on and on for years being miserable about a situation and not have it change you. You get so you can't stand yourself.

My ideal of womanhood has always been the pioneer woman who fought and worked at her husband's side. She bore the children, kept the home fires burning; she was the hub of the family, the planner and the dreamer.

I was shy for several years in my early days in Hollywood until I figured out that no one really gave a damn if I was shy or not, and I got over my shyness.

How I Love Lucy was born? We decided that instead of divorce lawyers profiting from our mistakes, we'd profit from them.

Women's Lib? Oh, I'm afraid it doesn't interest me one bit. I've been so liberated it hurts.

I'm sometimes scared of everything that has happened to us. We didn't think Desilu Productions would grow so big. We merely wanted to be together and have two children.

I regret the passing of the studio system. I was very appreciative of it because I had no talent.

Television is the quickest form of recognition in the world.

I will never do another TV series. It couldn't top I Love Lucy, and I'd be foolish to try. In this business, you have to know when to get off.

I never thought I was funny. I don't THINK funny.