- [on receiving the Best Supporting Actress Oscar, 1972] I'm at a point where I'm free to go out and have a little fun with my career. Some Oscar winners have dropped out of sight, as if they were standing on a trapdoor. Others picked it up and ran with it. I'm going to run with it.
- If you brush your teeth, you don't want to eat something right after because your mouth feels so fresh. So brushing your teeth actually prevents you from eating until later.
- When something is truly funny, it's funny all the time.
- The reason I am a good actress, I think, is because the times when I didn't have a good part and you think, "What the hell do you do with it?" You have to figure something out.
- If I were to do some outlandish role, I always made sure I'd be on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson (1962) to show that I wasn't that person that I played. I'd be myself. And so people got to know me, I think, and I think they know that I'm honest and truthful and real.
- My son became my manager, and he said to me, "Mom, if you could do anything you wanted to do, what would it be?" And out of my mouth immediately came, Dancing with the Stars (2005).
- I don't think "comedy" or "serious". I always brought seriousness to comedy and comedic things to serious roles.
- My mother was a darling, darling woman with a wonderful sense of humor. I remember when I finally developed, I was about 15 years old with a 32 C-D bust. I had to go away for something for a couple of weeks and mama wrote a lovely little letter. At the end it said, "P.S. WYB." I couldn't imagine what WYB was. It was Wash Your Brassiere. This is the kind of humor my mother had.
- I know that there's no God. I am very convinced of that -- and very happy about it.
- I worked very hard to be perfect. Well, there's nothing more boring than being perfect and when you try to be perfect, you're a little disconnected from reality... Be free, everyone. Free yourself. Get free. It's so much more fun. It's so empowering. Don't try to be like other people.
- I live a very leisurely life. When I do work, it's not work, it's great fun, and exciting and fresh. New, wonderful talented people. It's great pleasure and great fun.
- Kissing is the most wonderful, intimate, sexy thing in the world. Much more than... what's it called... fornicating!
- I was busy everyday on live television back in the 1940s and 1950s in New York. I was starring in one thing after another every week. Then at night I'd be on Broadway. What a wonderful education all of that was. What a wonderful, exciting, learning adventure. It's stood me in good stead all of these years, I think.
- [on her part cut out of Inglourious Basterds (2009)] I have heard that, and I would suspect that that's true, because it's very long and my thing isn't woven into the plot. It would be a very good scene to cut, in the sense that it wouldn't hurt the picture. It's a wonderful little scene. I love doing it and Quentin Tarantino loved it, too, but it's not going to make or break the film.
- For many, many years, I thought that God would get even with me or punish me because I didn't believe in him, or her, or them. And nothing ever happened except for good things. So I don't believe at all in God, and I'm very relieved that I don't. Extraordinary miracles, billions and trillions of them, happen all the time, but not because there's a God.
- About The Woman Who Willed a Miracle (1983), Cloris wrote in her autobiography "Cloris: My Autobiography" (2009): "I feel it is not only the best mother role I played, it is the best acting I've ever done." (page 158)
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