For acting, darlings, is the world’s most perilous trade. Compared with actors, steeple jacks and deep-sea divers lead snug and placid lives.
I have enemies I’ve never met – that’s fame.
Don’t be taken in by the guff that critics are killing the theater. Commonly they sin on the side of enthusiasm. Too often they give their blessing to trash.
Drink reacts on its practitioners in conflicting ways. One brave can knock off a quart of Scotch and look and act as sober as Herbert Hoover. Another, after three Martinis, makes two-cushion carroms off the chaise lounge as he attempts to negotiate the bathroom.
I’m not childless, darling. I am childfree.
A Republican. A Republican. That’s worse than being a goddamned Communist!
I’m the foe of moderation, the champion of excess.
In my lifetime I’ve been to bed with men, women, and odd pieces of furniture.
My progress reminded me of the horses in The Whip. They raced at the limit of their speed directly toward the audience. But they raced on a treadmill which canceled out their progress.
I’ve been called many things, but never an intellectual.
I’m not at my best when I moralize or philosophize. Logic is elusive, especially to one who so rarely uses it.
I’m the foe of moderation, the champion of excess. If I may lift a line from a die-hard whose identity is lost in the shuffle, ‘I’d rather be strongly wrong than weakly right.’
I detest acting because it is sheer drudgery.
If you know your Bible and your Shakespeare and can shoot craps, you have a liberal education.
A frozen daiquiri of a scorching afternoon is soothing. It makes living more tolerable.
It’s unlikely I’ll ever submit to a psychiatrist’s couch. I don’t want some stranger prowling around through my psyche, monkeying with my id. I don’t need an analyst to tell me that I have never had any sense of security. Who has?
I have been tight as a tick! Fried as a mink! Stiff as a goat!
Whatever you have read I have said is almost certainly untrue, except if it is funny, in which case I definitely said it.
In the theater lying is looked upon as an occupational disease.
The only thing I regret about my past is the length of it. If I had to live my life again, I’d make the same mistakes, only sooner.
Acting is the most insecure of all the trades, the most risky. In their professional lifetime most actors rehearse longer than they play, spend more time traipsing from office to office in search of jobs than they rehearse and play combined.