Famous quotes

Quotes by famous people, credited to who said them. Your own quotes must not match any of these. More are added all the time. 1,158,808 quotes Who coined it · How we decide

English Italiano Polski עברית Français Português فارسی Español 中文 Русский Deutsch العربية हिन्दी 日本語 Ελληνικά Latina

Lily Tomlin

24 quotes

“And that's the truth!”
Lily Tomlin (born 1939) first seen 1969 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Closing line of her skits as "Edith Ann", on Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In (1969 - 1973), and in later productions.
“I've seen these women all my life, I know how they walk, I know how they talk...”
Lily Tomlin (born 1939) first seen 1975 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Response after being asked how she felt playing a heterosexual in Nashville, on her album Modern Scream (1975)
“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.”
Lily Tomlin (born 1939) first seen 1975 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Modern Scream (1975)
“There's so much plastic in this culture that vinyl leopard skin is becoming an endangered synthetic.”
Lily Tomlin (born 1939) first seen 1981 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As Judith Beasley in The Incredible Shrinking Woman (1981)
“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.”
Lily Tomlin (born 1939) first seen 1983 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Referring to her teenage diary, in an interview in Movie magazine (July 1983)
“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.”
Lily Tomlin (born 1939) first seen 2003 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in Variety magazine (2003)
“If you can't be direct, why be?”
Lily Tomlin (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Friend. Songwriter. The Great Harmonizer of Humanity. Dolly. Dolly. Dolly. Forever Dolly.”
Lily Tomlin (born 1939) first seen 2026 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Remarks on X after the death of Dolly Parton (25 August 2026)
“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.”
Lily Tomlin (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Why isn't there a special name for the tops of your feet?”
Lily Tomlin (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Lily Tomlin (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Lily Tomlin (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Lily Tomlin (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Lily Tomlin (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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”
Lily Tomlin (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Lily Tomlin (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Lily Tomlin (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Lily Tomlin (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Lily Tomlin (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Lily Tomlin (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I like a teacher who gives you something to take home to think about besides homework”
Lily Tomlin (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Lily Tomlin (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Lily Tomlin (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Lily Tomlin (born 1939) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source