"Why do people say "grow some balls"? Balls are weak and sensitive. If you wanna be tough, grow a vagina. Those things can take a pounding."

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

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

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

"I think older women still have a full life."

"Animal lover that I am, a cougar I am not."

"I've enjoyed the opposite sex a lot. Always have. Always will."

"I always wanted to be a zookeeper when I was growing up, and I've wound up a zookeeper! I've been working with the Los Angeles Zoo for 45 years! I'm the luckiest old broad on two feet because my life is divided absolutely in half - half animals and half show business. You can't ask for better than two things you love the most."

"I didn't know what Facebook was, and now that I do know what it is, I have to say, it sounds like a huge waste of time."

"Hot dogs and Red Vines and potato chips and French fries are my favorite foods."

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

"I have a two-story house and a bad memory, so I'm up and down those stairs all the time. That's my exercise."

"I'm a teenager trapped in an old body."

"The bottom line is, I'm blessed with good health. On top of that, I don't go around thinking 'Oh, I'm 90, I better do this or I better do that.' I'm just Betty. I'm the same Betty that I've always been. Take it or leave it."

"I don't seem to require a lot of sleep. I just - if I get four, five good hours, I'm fine. But sleeping is sort of dull. There's a lot of other good stuff that you can do without just lying down and closing your eyes."

"A lot of people think this is a goodie two-shoes talking. But we do have a tendency to complain rather than celebrating who we are. I learned at my mother's knee it's better to appreciate what's happening... I think we kind of talk ourselves into the negative sometimes."

"My mother and dad were big animal lovers, too. I just don't know how I would have lived without animals around me. I'm fascinated by them - both domestic pets and the wild community. They just are the most interesting things in the world to me, and it's made such a difference in my lifetime."

"You can always tell about somebody by the way they put their hands on an animal."

"I'm in the middle of my sixth book, which is about animals at the Los Angeles Zoo."

"I enjoy being busy, I really do. Remember, I'm the stub end of the railroad. I have no family, so I'm not taking busy time away from people that I should be spending it with. So I'm just relaxing and enjoying it."

"Wilderness is harder and harder to find these days on this beautiful planet, and we're abusing our planet to the point of almost no return."

"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."

"People have told me 'Betty, Facebook is a great way to keep in touch with old friends...' .. At my age, if I wanted to keep in touch with old friends, I'd need a Ouija board"

"I don't care who anybody sleeps with. If a couple has been together all that time - and there are gay relationships that are more solid than some heterosexual ones - I think it's fine if they want to get married. I don't know how people can get so anti-something."

"Retirement is not in my vocabulary. They aren't going to get rid of me that way."

"I love words. Sudoku I don't get into, I'm not into numbers that much, and there are people who are hooked on that. But crossword puzzles, I just can't - if I get a puppy and I paper train him and I put the - if all of a sudden I'd open the paper and there's a crossword puzzle - 'No, no, you can't go on that, honey. I'll take it.'"

"I think a lot of people like hidden-camera shows where they think they're spying on somebody who doesn't know they're looking at them. And nobody takes it seriously - you either enjoy it and get a laugh out of the reactions or not."

"I think it's your mental attitude. So many of us start dreading age in high school and that's a waste of a lovely life. 'Oh... I'm 30, oh, I'm 40, oh, 50.' Make the most of it."

"You don't luck into integrity. You work at it."

"I just make it my business to get along with people so I can have fun. It's that simple."

"I am interested in a lot of things - not just show business and my passion for animals. I try to keep current in what's going on in the world. I do mental exercises. I don't have any trouble memorizing lines because of the crossword puzzles I do every day to keep my mind a little limber. I don't sit and vegetate."

"Long ago, I did a five-and-a-half-hour-a-day, six-day-a-week talk show for four years, early on, in Los Angeles - local show. And when you are on that many hours with no script, you know, you get very comfortable, maybe overly comfortable with that small audience."

"A good friend of mine was Lucy Ball. Her mother and my mother were best friends."

"Wendy Malick and Valerie Bertinelli make fun of me, but I take care of my health - I don't abuse it."

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

"I like bawdy humor. I love bawdy humor, but not dirty humor."

"Why retire from something if you're loving it so much and enjoying it so much, and you're blessed with another group of people to work with like the gang on 'Hot in Cleveland?' Why would I think of retiring? What would I do with myself?"

"It's a little known fact that one in three family pets gets lost during its lifetime, and approximately 9 million pets enter shelters each year. That's why it's a wonderful thing to get your pet microchipped and registered with your contact information because then they can be located and the owners can track where their pets are."

"I don't know where I learned elephants like their tongues slapped. Whatever turns you on."

"All creatures must learn to coexist. That’s why the brown bear and the field mouse can share their lives in harmony. Of course, they can’t mate or the mice would explode."

"If you have one good series, you know, it's a blessing. Two good series is unusual. Three is a phenomenon, but right now, I'm working with these wonderful women on 'Hot in Cleveland,' and Valerie Bertinelli, and Wendy Malick and Jane Leeves are like, it's like the buddy-ship we had on 'Golden Girls' and 'Mary Tyler Moore.'"

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

"I love Cadillacs and name them after birds."

"I'm in the acting business. That's the ego business."

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

"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.'"

"I think that a show that is as successful as 'The Golden Girls' is a once-in-a-lifetime thing. If you don't feel proud to be part of a show that has that kind of track record, then shame on you, because that's a privilege."

"I really don't care with whom you sleep. I just care what kind of a decent human being you are."

"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."