Lorna Luft quotes:

To me, being grown-up meant smoking cigarettes, drinking cocktails, and dressing up in high heels and glamourous outfits.

The high point of my entire junior high school career was going backstage to meet George Harrison. I was simply awestruck.

When you're Judy Garland and you want something, you just pick up the phone and call somebody. Anybody.

The world fell apart. Sirhan Sirhan shot Bobby Kennedy. Why were people shooting all the Kennedys? Had the country gone mad?

My mother was a phoenix who always expected to rise from the ashes of her latest disaster. She loved being Judy Garland.

My mother was a phoenix who always expected to rise from the ashes of her latest disaster. She loved being Judy Garland

Dodi got a lot of criticism when he began dating Princess Diana. No one seemed to think he was good enough for her.

It was at one of the parties at our house that The Rat Pack got started.

My mother's suicide attempts were a way to release anxiety and get attention. Some of the attempts were drug reactions she didn't even remember later on.

I used drugs as a social activity; a way to have fun with friends.

I had grown up accustomed to living a life of high drama.

I choose not to think of my life as surviving, but coping.

I have a healthy body, free of the chemicals that once controlled it.

Fabio kept asking me out, but I knew we'd never get his ego through the door.

Instead of joyfully looking forward to my birth, my mother began systematically preparing for her own death. She was fatalistic.

My mother should have been Jewish. She could have taught a class on how to induce guilt.

Between them, my parents had 10 marriages.

The only difference between the Bel Air of the '90s and the Bel Air of my childhood is that now the nannies are Latina instead of British, and the cars European instead of American.

When my mother signed at MGM, that was the only kind of contract you could sign. There was no such thing as an independent agent.

Barry Manilow has gone from being the love of my life to being a friend for life.

Children have a way of forcing you back into the present moment.

A gay man has no business leading on a heterosexual woman.

When your parent is a public idol, you never really have a chance to lay that parent to rest.

I was born in a blender.

There are some family traditions I don't want my children to carry on.

The one thing I never questioned about my mother was whether she loved me.

One trait of addictive families is that we never recognize our own addictions.

A star needs all the rest she can get.

My sister Liza and I have never felt that we were in competition.

Life will force you to make changes you never wanted to make.

My mother was electric onstage, and I vividly recall the extraordinary power she had over her audiences

I spent an entire evening seated between Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, being charmed from either side. It was pure Hollywood magic.

The eyebrow pencil and false eyelashes were essential; my mother didn't feel dressed without them.

People are always asking me what it's like to be Judy Garland's daughter. It's hard to be a legend's child.

One of the oddities about being Judy Garland's daughter was that everyone treated my mother with such awe that they would never have asked me the normal questions kids get about their moms.

When I look back at The Judy Garland Show, I have such mixed feelings. It broke my mother's heart when they canceled it.

My mother's life had been destroyed by the Garland legend.

The sicker mother got, the stranger the people surrounding her became. I called them The Garland Freaks.

The most memorable night of The Judy Garland Show for me was the night my mother pulled me out of the audience and sang to me onstage.

The only difference between the Bel Air of the '90s and the Bel Air of my childhood is that now the nannies are Latina instead of British, and the cars European instead of American

Studio 54 made Halloween in Hollywood look like a PTA meeting.

There is a time of reckoning in all our lives.

When I got a call from Los Angeles to do the Tonight Show, I considered it more of an inconvenience than an opportunity.

Liza is in the tabloids almost as much as our mother was. She has struggled with her own ghosts and shadows.

Living in continual chaos is exhausting, frightening. The catch is that it's also very addictive.

I have spent much of my adult life flinching with pain as I tried to pull out the threads that bound the shadows of my past to me.

A career is all very well, but no one lives by work alone.

A piece of advice I would give to young actors - hang on to your family, and hang on to your reality - and hang on to your "real". Because you're going into the land of make believe.

Although I loved Liza as a little girl, it would be true to say I really didn't know her.

Being an actor is really odd. So, don't take that as your reality - take your family, take your friends, take your relationships - that's your reality. And hang on to them.

Dinah had all the class.

Even at al my mother's concerts, I had never seen people go crazy the way they did with the Beatles.

Every time I go out on a stage I consider myself very lucky. Because, in a time where people are economically thinking about what to go and see - so, when I am on a stage, and it doesn't matter where I am, that's my favorite show. I come home after and say "That was my favorite show".

I did my first Broadway show when I was nineteen years old - and to be able to say that I am still working with the incredible talents of all of the creative teams that I have been able to work with - that's so special to me.

I don't like to hear anybody in show business complain, because I just find it to be such a grateful business. Because there are so many wonderful, creative souls out there and there are so few jobs. And, so, I just find myself thinking to myself "wow, if I could get into a show of any kind and have it last for a while" - that's when I find myself really happy.

I guess the only way I could describe myself is someone that lives right in the present.

I really don't look at my past and I really don't look too much to the future because I find that's sort of redundant. I really live right in the present. I live right in the now.

I think every show I do, whether I am doing eight shows a week of a Broadway show... I think, "that's a show I'll never get back"... I go home at night and I think to myself, "that was my favorite".

I think that when you're in your twenties you think about your future, when you're in your thirties you're raising kids and you think about their future, but when you get to a time when you are diagnosed with any kind of life altering illness, what did you take away from it? And what I took away from it was how to live in the "now".

I understand wanting to do your craft. I understand wanting to have a passion for your art and for your ability to be an actor, to be a singer, to be a dancer - that I understand. Wanting to be famous - I don't get that. But that's where we're living right now.

If you really want to kill yourself, you get a gun and blow your head off

I'm extraordinarily honored and proud when I am told that I am part of the Broadway community and part of the Broadway family. Because, Broadway is a family. And it doesn't matter if you did one show or if you did fifty shows.

Maybe people don't know I'm a news junkie? I watch and I tape a breadth of everything that's happening in the world, and that fascinates me.

My feeling about young people who want to pursue a career is - the first thing is do your homework on where it all started. Go back and look at history. Look at why the shows you are loving today happened and the artists you are listening to happened. And do your homework on history. Whether it's musical movies, musical plays, Broadway musical recordings - do your homework! And then, that way you will have an understanding of why, now, certain movies, certain plays, certain musicals are making some sort of sense.

My mother wasn't rational those last years; if she had been, she would have been horrified by her own behavior.

People come up to me as I leave the stage after a performance and tell me tey saw my mother onstage with me every time I sing. I keep a sense of humor about it.

The Broadway community is unlike any community in show business and it is unlike any community in the world. When you come into the Broadway community they open the door and they say "welcome". Not only do they do that, but when times are really tough and horrendous things have happened and really tragic things - the Broadway community shows up! And they say "how can we help?".

There's so much, I guess I want to say, nonsense about show business now. Because of reality television. I don't get this, because I was never raised to get this, but I don't understand wanting to be famous. Maybe it's because I was born famous, but I don't get it.

When you're in show business no matter what you're doing it's an insecure business.

Life will force you to make changes you never wanted to make

Sinatra was just one of Mom's friends.