“She's more even -[daughter China] - I think it jumps generations. You get a screwball in one, and then the next one is straight, then you get a screwball. My grandmother was goofy, my mother was straight.”

“That was the only time my mother saw me on stage. At one point in the play I am strangled and my mother jumped from her seat and screamed: 'No. You will not get away with murder. You cannot do this to my daughter.' Friends explained to her that this was not for real — that we were acting. But she made such a fuss. Everyone was so embarrassed. On stage my heart sank.”

“On a double-log plot, my grandmother fits on a straight line.”

“My show was so personal, I made it feel like you and I were the only ones there. And I’d say: Boys and girls, come here. Uncle Jack wants to tell you something. You go get Mother or Daddy, Grandmother, Grandfather, whoever is in the house. You go get them, and you make sure they exercise with me.”

“Strange as it may seem to those who have read much of the screwball side of Hollywood life, I have never had to fight against an impulse to jump into a swimming-pool while dressed for the opera.”

“Next time you think of me like that, say my name when you come. It'll get you off even better.”

“When he asked my grandmother if she would mind being poor, she said she would be happy just to have her daughter and himself: 'If you have love, even plain water is sweet.”

“We lost the crickets," she said. "Even you can't make that sound tough."

…"I am Butler," he said with a straight-face. "Everything I say sounds tough. Now, get out of the lake, fairy.”

“Once, I was my mother's daughter. Now I am my daughter's mother.”

“You don’t think progress goes in a straight line, do you? Do you recognize that it is an ascending, accelerating, maybe even exponential curve? It takes hell’s own time to get started, but when it goes it goes like a bomb.”