Lily Tomlin quotes

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.

Remember we're all in this alone.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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