My Lucky Stars Quotes

“Perhaps, symbolically, we viewed these films from behind so that we could surprise-attack anything that frightened us. Perhaps we needed the option of recreating the truth the way we wanted it to be.”
― Shirley MacLaine, My Lucky Stars: A Hollywood Memoir

“Or perhaps early on I had the feeling that there was, as Walt Whitman wrote, “a multitude of humanity within me,” and I enjoyed identifying with the multitude on the screen.”
― Shirley MacLaine, My Lucky Stars: A Hollywood Memoir

“Manipulation is often our livelihood, our technique of choice in order to succeed at being noticed, acknowledged, and loved. Like Oscar Wilde’s definition of a cynic, we sometimes know the price of everything and the value of nothing.”
― Shirley MacLaine, My Lucky Stars: A Hollywood Memoir

“the more we understand ourselves, the better we are at our work. This is not an easy task because we so often enjoy playing other people in order to avoid who we are.”
― Shirley MacLaine, My Lucky Stars: A Hollywood Memoir

“I never wanted to adopt a mask. I feared that my face would grow into it. A mask was too confining anyway. I wanted, I needed to be free … free of any image I would create. Free of dependency upon it, free of committing myself completely to it or to anything else for that matter … there it was … I wanted to be free of the long-term soul-searing pain that only comes from committing completely to something.”
― Shirley MacLaine, My Lucky Stars: A Hollywood Memoir

“How did you manage,” he said, “after so many years in the minefields of Hollywood, to retain the capacity to have your feelings hurt?” The question stunned me. I couldn’t answer. My friend pressed on. “I want to know,” he said, “why you haven’t become one of those well-functioning thing people? The ones with shrewd dead eyes who no longer live behind their faces; the ones who operate successfully but can’t feel pain anymore. One of those people who got what they wanted from Hollywood, but never knew what they wanted from themselves. How come that didn’t happen to you?”
― Shirley MacLaine, My Lucky Stars: A Hollywood Memoir

“Why do these people emerge from my memories as leading players in my play? Because they set me on my course and they taught me many things.”
― Shirley MacLaine, My Lucky Stars: A Hollywood Memoir

“We think so much about ourselves, not realizing that we are truly mirrored in the people around us.”
― Shirley MacLaine, My Lucky Stars: A Hollywood Memoir

“When I was younger and in the thick of the experience, Hollywood didn’t seem so cosmically miraculous to me. It was play, definitely, but it was also hard work. I was learning. I was struggling to stay afloat, to understand what was happening to me. I had fun and I had depression, oh yes, but I didn’t take the time to revel completely in the fullness of either. I was too busy regarding myself—keeping an eye on the future and looking over my shoulder at the past—to understand the miracle of the breathtaking creativity around me.”
― Shirley MacLaine, My Lucky Stars: A Hollywood Memoir

“It taught me that success was always temporary, and failure, a lesson about self. It taught me that winning and losing were essentially the same and the secret was to treat each with equal detachment.”
― Shirley MacLaine, My Lucky Stars: A Hollywood Memoir

“The reality of Hollywood is that every person creates his or her own image, and in the process can so easily be exalted or ruined, held aloft in the light or burned out by his or her own luminosity.”
― Shirley MacLaine, My Lucky Stars: A Hollywood Memoir

“We live in a world of images. They bombard us twenty-four hours a day. If not in the newspapers or on our television screens, then most certainly in our heads. The birthplace of many of those images is Hollywood, where artists create the illusion of infinite possibilities. Hollywood dangles golden fruit on branches that are out of reach for so many, yet it also inspires hope and optimism.”
― Shirley MacLaine, My Lucky Stars: A Hollywood Memoir