Quotes

You know, three whales get in trouble and people from all over volunteer to help. Wouldn't it be wonderful if one old has-been actor with a hose up his nose could help millions?

I have done more in this chair here than I could have ever done in Hollywood.

I don't work because I love it. In our household, work is something Daddy does to provide us with things we need for our physical comforts . . . I love other things more than my work.

[Of his seizure that caused him to end his best-known role on Bewitched (1964)]: I was too sick to go on. I had a temperature of 105, full of strong antibiotics, for almost 10 days. I went to work that day but I was sick. I lay in my dressing room after being in make-up, waiting to be called on the set. They knew I was feeling pretty rotten, and they tried to give me time to rest. I kept having chills. This was the middle of the summer and I was wearing a sheepskin jacket and I was chilling. I was shaking all over. Then, while sitting on a scaffolding with Maurice Evans, being lit for a special effects scene: They were setting an inky - that's a little tiny spot[light] that was supposed to be just flickering over my eyes. That flickering, flickering flickering made me feel weird. And I'm sitting on this platform up in the air...and I turned to Gibby, who was just down below, and I said, 'Gibby, I think I have to get down.' He started to help me down and that's the last thing I remember until I woke up on the floor. That's about all I remember of the incident...and I'd managed to bite a very large hole in the side of my tongue before they could pry my teeth apart.

[Just before his death]: I am happy, complete. I know that you've known me a very longtime, I've been on television, I've been in your living rooms and now I'm in your heart!

I've been blessed. I have no complaints. I've been surrounded by people in radio, on stage and in motion pictures and television who love me. The things that have gone wrong have been simply physical things.

There are no rewards for what you do -- you do it because you have to. It's your nature as a human being. You have to... That's how I feel about it.

[About the hard part of returning to acting] I did not want to go back into acting so much that I let myself get fat. I gained 126 pounds -- a whole other person. I grew a beard -- I was disguising myself. Things got totally out of hand, and all the ego trips and insecurities there are to deal with. In my whole career, there had been only four things that gave me complete artistic satisfaction: Inherit the Wind (1960) with Stanley Kramer directing; working with Elia Kazan in Bus Stop on Broadway; a play I did on Playhouse 90 (1956) with Paul Muni; and an episode of Route 66 (1960).