Betty White

I was an only child and I had a mother and father who were just - there wasn't a straight man in the house, and I mean that in a very nice way. They were fun, and we would laugh a lot.

Don't try to be young. Just open your mind. Stay interested in stuff. There are so many things I won't live long enough to find out about, but I'm still curious about them. You know people who are already saying, 'I'm going to be 30 - oh, what am I going to do?' Well, use that decade! Use them all!

Animals don't lie. Animals don't criticize. If animals have moody days, they handle them better than humans do.

I have my golden retriever now, Pontiac. He's a career-change guide dog from Guide Dogs for the Blind.

When I pontificate, it sounds so, you know, Oh, well, she's preaching. I'm not preaching, but I think maybe I learned it from my animal friends. Kindness and consideration of somebody besides yourself. I think that keeps you feeling young. I really do.

You gotta use everything you possibly can!

I'm a big cockeyed optimist. I try to accentuate the positive as opposed to the negative.

I've worked with the Los Angeles Zoo for 45 years, and we have this magnificent photographer, Tad Motoyama. He takes these wonderful, wonderful animal pictures. All through the years he's given me copies of these pictures. Well, I have all these gorgeous ones, so I said, 'Tad, I want to do a book with your picture on one side.'

I think everybody needs a passion. Whether it's one passion or a hundred, that's what keep life interesting.

I had to make a major decision with myself because I just don't think you can do both: try to have a baby career and raise it and have a baby baby and raise it. And to try to do justice to either one. It was a very conscious decision on my part not to have children - which I have never regretted.

Snow always inspires such awe in me. Just consider one tiny snowflake alone, so delicate, so fragile, so ethereal. And yet, let a billion of them come together through the majestic force of nature, they can screw up a whole city.

My mother always used to say: 'The older you get, the better you get, unless you're a banana.'

During the Depression, my dad made radios to sell to make extra money. Nobody had any money to buy the radios, so he would trade them for dogs. He built kennels in the backyard, and he cared for the dogs.

Animals are near and dear to my heart, and I've devoted my life to trying to improve their lives.

I'm having the time of my life and the fact that I'm still working - how lucky can you get? I'm 90 years old and still able to work as much as I do. That's a privilege.

I think we're losing our sense of humor instead of being able to relax and laugh at ourselves. I don't care whether it's ethnicity, age, sexual orientation, or whose ox is being gored.

If one has no sense of humor, one is in trouble.

The audience today has heard every joke. They know every plot. They know where you're going before you even start. That's a tough audience to surprise, and a tough audience to write for. It's much more competitive now, because the audience is so much more - I want to say sophisticated.

We laugh a lot. That's for sure. Sure beats the alternative, doesn't it?

I may be a senior, but so what? I'm still hot.

Kindness and consideration of somebody besides yourself. I think that keeps you feeling young. I really do.