Lucille Ball

My ideal of womanhood has always been the pioneer woman who fought and worked at her husband’s side. She bore the children, kept the home fires burning; she was the hub of the family, the planner and the dreamer.

Lucille Ball

Now get the hell out of here and go change the world.

Lucille Ball

Remember to recognize the small successes that you will have. Don’t let the brightness of that big goal blind you to what happens on the way toward the goal. Meet one wave at a time and enjoy what progress you make. I want you please not to be taken up in the undertow of pessimism.

Lucille Ball

There’s a great deal of difference between temperament and temper. Temperament is something you welcome creatively, for it is based on sensitivity, empathy, awareness… but a bad temper takes too much out of you and doesn’t really accomplish anything.

Lucille Ball

I am a real ham. I love an audience. I work better with an audience. I am dead, in fact, without one.

Lucille Ball

I don’t suppose that hard work, discipline, and a perfectionist attitude toward my work did me any harm. They are a big part of my makeup today, as any of my co-workers will tell you. And when life seemed unbearable, I learned to live in my imagination, and to step inside other people’s skins – indispensable abilities for an actress.

Lucille Ball

I hate failure and that divorce was a number one failure in my eyes. It was the worst period of my life. Neither Desi nor I have been the same since, physically or mentally.

Lucille Ball

I wanted to get out of the pictures and stay home so that I could have children.

Lucille Ball

I will never do another TV series. It couldn’t top I Love Lucy, and I’d be foolish to try. In this business, you have to know when to get off.

Lucille Ball

I’m sometimes scared of everything that has happened to us. We didn’t think Desilu Productions would grow so big. We merely wanted to be together and have two children.

Lucille Ball