Ali MacGraw Quotes

Modeling was so fleeting it doesn’t count in my life scheme.

I was really involved with other people’s opinions of me, and it got heightened during my film career. I don’t have any opinion, good or bad about it, it just was. It’s not the way I feel now, and I think yoga has a lot to do with that.

I’m much more famous than I am rich, but I’m able to scale back my lifestyle. I know a lot of people who were where I was who can’t imagine living any simpler, but I haven’t got a lot of expensive wants.

The quality of my life has changed dramatically – not the events – but the way I handle them and my priorities and my sense of drama.

I had a romantic, ‘Aren’t I a good girl?’ take on divorce, but the truth is that was stupid.

If you want to be watched 24 hours a day in everything you do, you can’t turn that around. You can’t wake up three years later and say, ‘Stop bothering me, I’m a serious actor,’ if all you’ve done is wear certain clothes and show up half-loaded at clubs.

I had no real experience studying acting; I came to it having done other things for a living for many, many years, and I have this gigantic respect for experience and technique.

I think it’s tough when you’re very young and you maybe fall for the celebrity and being the center of attention.

I want to be a person who makes a quiet difference.

Looking at beautiful things is what makes me the happiest.

You know, the fashion business is this legendary repository of young girls on their way to getting husbands. I really wanted to work.

When one stops working at the height of one’s career, it’s just stupid not to say, ‘I want to make sure I have a house.’

In film, there’s so many little things where not just the actor can blow his lines, but technically, it doesn’t quite come off in the perfect way envisioned.

I have this amazing life.

I think we live in a time where people are just insane on the subject of how they look.

Here’s what I had: I had the arrogance of saying I’d like to be in a ‘good’ movie, so in fact, when I was hot, I turned down a lot of stuff because I didn’t think I wanted to watch it.

I’m learning how to live in the present and be grateful for what’s working rather than look for the ‘what’s not working’ piece.

There’s so much craziness that comes along with being a movie star that you can get so confused. Unless you’ve spent your whole life waiting to be the centre of attention, it’s pretty terrifying.

It’s been my experience that the longer I do yoga, the more I want to know, the more I am able to understand and the less judgmental I am.

I can’t remember when I wasn’t an animal rights activist.

I’m in total awe of the technique of great film people. Because if you get your emotional life up to perfection by miracle on Take One, you better have a technique to keep doing it again and again and again.

People tell me that I am well-grounded. I am sane in the New England sense of the word.

I live in Santa Fe, New Mexico. And I travel a tremendous amount. I’m in New York and California a lot, but then also I like faraway places a lot.

I don’t enjoy other people’s dramas, and I don’t enjoy mine.

I’ve always loved animals and I always thought that they were, if not better, then the absolute equal of any two legged creature that God ever created.

It’s not so much what do I want to be doing in 15 years, it’s how I want to be in 15 years.

I think that I was lucky that I was 30 when I did ‘Love Story’, which came with this extravagant pop celebrity. I had already done 15 years of what I call ‘real’ work.’ I was a waitress, chambermaid, and a photographer’s assistant, so I knew that I was tremendously lucky as a novice actor to have that big hit.

I fully expect to be doing yoga for the rest of my life.

My parents made no money whatsoever, but they really knew how to see, as artists. So a big adventure might be, on a hot, dreadful day with no place to go, to go out and draw our chickens with pastels. My parents gave me a sense of wonder.

My ex-husband happens to be one of the most gifted moviemakers. And what is so bizarre about working with someone like that? I guess it is bizarre to be good friends with your ex-husband.

I’m very touched on a deep level by cruelty to animals.

If you’re a baby about the media, as I was, you can’t imagine what it’s like when the great approval machine shines its beam on you, when every time you cross the street someone comes out of a manhole to talk about your haircut.

I think something will soon have to be done to protect people from hacking and blogging and lying and spreading rumors and chasing you down the street. Lives are wrecked that way.