Quotes, Quotations and Sayings

My doctor told me to stop having intimate dinners for four unless there are three other people.

The essential is to excite the spectators. If that means playing Hamlet on a flying trapeze or in an aquarium, you do it.

If there hadn't been women we'd still be squatting in a cave eating raw meat, because we made civilization in order to impress our girl friends. And they tolerated it and let us go ahead and play with our toys.

Every actor in his heart believes everything bad that's printed about him.

I think we're a kind of desperation. We're sort of a maddening luxury. The basic and essential human is the woman, and all that we're doing is trying to brighten up the place. That's why all the birds who belong to our sex have prettier feathers -- because males have got to try and justify their existence.

We know, Mr. Weller -- we, who are men of the world -- that a good uniform must work its way with the women, sooner or later.

We're born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we're not alone.

Now we sit through Shakespeare in order to recognize the quotations.

When you are down and out something always turns up-and it is usually the noses of your friends.

In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock!

I'm disappointed in acting as a craft. I want everything to go back to Orson Welles and fake noses and changing your voice. It's become so much about personality.

The ideal American type is perfectly expressed by the Protestant, individualist, anti-conformist, and this is the type that is in the process of disappearing. In reality there are few left.

When you are down and out something always turns up -- and it is usually the noses of your friends.

I don't say we all ought to misbehave, but we ought to look as if we could.

They teach anything in universities today. You can major in mud pies.

The director is simply the audience. So the terrible burden of the director is to take the place of that yawning vacuum, to be the audience and to select from what happens during the day which movement shall be a disaster and which a gala night. His job is to preside over accidents.

I rather think the cinema will die. Look at the energy being exerted to revive it -- yesterday it was color, today three dimensions. I don't give it forty years more. Witness the decline of conversation. Only the Irish have remained incomparable conversationalists, maybe because technical progress has passed them by.

Ecstasy is not really part of the scene we can do on celluloid.

Everybody denies I am a genius --but nobody ever called me one!

Hollywood is the only industry, even taking in soup companies, which does not have laboratories for the purpose of experimentation.

The laws and the stage, both are a form of exhibitionism.

A film is never really any good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.

Only very intelligent people don't wish they were in politics, and I'm dumb enough to want to be in there.

I hate it when people pray on the screen. It's not because I hate praying, but whenever I see an actor fold his hands and look up in the spotlight, I'm lost. There's only one other thing in the movies I hate as much, and that's sex. You just can't get in bed or pray to God and convince me on the screen.

I hate television. I hate it as much as peanuts. But I can't stop eating peanuts.

I want to give the audience a hint of a scene. No more than that. Give them too much and they won't contribute anything themselves. Give them just a suggestion and you get them working with you. That's what gives the theater meaning: when it becomes a social act.

My doctor told me to stop having intimate dinners for four. Unless there are three other people.

In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love; they had five hundred years of democracy and peace and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.

I passionately hate the idea of being with it. I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.

Gluttony is not a secret vice.

I hate television. I hate it as much as I hate peanuts. But I can't stop eating peanuts.

Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what's for lunch.