Quotes

I can't act. I have never acted. And I shall never act. What I can do is suspend my audience's power of judgement till I've finished.

I believe that God felt sorry for actors, so he created Hollywood to give them a place in the sun and a swimming pool--the price they had to pay was to surrender their talent.

Actors and burglars work better at night.

England is my wife. America is my mistress. It is very good sometimes to get away from one's wife.

[on TV commercials] The last refuge of optimism in a world of gloom.

[on sneak previews] Let one dim-witted schoolboy scrawl "lousy" on his card, and the entire studio may be stampeded the following morning in an executive meeting to discuss slicing and revising the picture to shreds. On Hollywood's theory that the customer must know best, the schoolboy's "lousy" is regarded as the last word in dramatic criticism.

The director's tricks are accomplished by converting plays into spectacles of love, landscape and lust, and the actors into puppets. Unhappily, a lot of young actors and actresses are destroyed in the process. They are drilled to perfection in a single role, while the director tries to produce performances by direction alone. As a result, they may be ruined for anything beyond the single role.

By temperament, a young actor needs to be mercurial, if nothing else, able to shed misfortunes like a duck shedding water and to magnify a pinpoint of hope into a golden dawn.

Actors must practice restraint else think what might happen in a love scene.

When actors are talking, they are servants of the dramatist. It is what they can show the audience when they are not talking that reveals the fine actor.

My aim is to leave the theater and the screen better than I found them.

I want to be one of those reformers. I am content to makes a virtue of necessity and modestly disclaim my desire to be a great reformer. I am resigned to be one of the myriad little ones; but I propose to be a very good little one.

I once heard Shaw [George Bernard Shaw] say there are two kinds of actors: those who are happy and confidant only in being themselves, and those who are timid and self-conscious and only at ease when they are able to take refuge in some character as far removed from themselves as possible. To the former, film acting is a joy; for the latter, it is difficult and disturbing.

[on his role in Sentimental Journey (1946)] I did nothing but look at the handsome bosom of Maureen O'Hara and listen to the murmuring of her heart through a stethoscope.

Hollywood may be thickly populated, but to me it's still a bewilderness.

[on his role as Pharaoh Sethi in The Ten Commandments (1956)] It was a very great pleasure to play it. And, of course, it was a very great privilege to work with Mr. DeMille [Cecil B. DeMille], who really was dedicated to this particular picture.

[on George Bernard Shaw] He fought as nobody else did for recognition of the actor as an intelligent member of the community.

I'm the only actor I know who never wanted to do anything else.

Shaw was a sort of godfather to me.

I played Hamlet at 14, and got that out of my system.

The more I see of life, the more I prefer the world of the theater to the real world.