Quotes

People in America, when listening to radio, like to lean forward. People in Britain like to lean back.

In America the race is on between its decadence and its vitality, and it has plenty of both.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

I'm still an Englishman in America. An Irish Lancastrian, really. I don't kid myself that I'm from Arkansas.

As always, the British shudder at the latest American vulgarity, and then embrace it with enthusiasm two years later.

[on Mary Pickford] She was the girl every young man wanted to have -- as his sister.

[on Douglas Fairbanks] Fairbanks' glory, the mystery of his visual imagination, is that he could throw away all the text book tricks on the makeshift apparatus of ordinary life. To Fairbanks the limb of a tree suggests a hocks-off; a narrow lane with high walls is a risky, but workable, set of parallel bars; a spear is a pole to vault with.

[on Greta Garbo] Every man's harmless fantasy mistress. She gave you the impression that, if your imagination had to sin, it could at least congratulate itself on its impeccable taste.

On television, if you're getting intimate, you must look in people's eyes, which is why I've never used a teleprompter. You see the camera's eye is the eye of the audience, and you must look into it. For the "Masterpiece Theater" segments. I do six or seven a day, memorizing each one before it's to be filmed.