Richard Burton

“I abhor mere prettiness.”

“The Welsh are all actors. It's only the bad ones who become professional.”

“Warren Beatty seems very self-conscious and actory.”

“If I had a chance for another life, I would certainly choose a better complexion.”

“Sometimes I am so much my father's son that I give myself occasional creeps.”

“I am as dispassionate as it is possible for a human being to be and not be a machine.”

“When I played drunks I had to remain sober because I didn't know how to play them when I was drunk.”

“False friendship, like the ivy, decays and ruins the walls it embraces; but true friendship gives new life and animation to the object it supports.”

“'The Robe' was lousy but an almighty hit. I was dull as ditchwater and an almighty flop.”

“I didn't speak English until I was ten, when Philip Burton, the schoolmaster who became my guardian, took me under his wing.”

“How strange are the tricks of memory, which, often hazy as a dream about the most important events of a man's life, religiously preserve the merest trifles.”

“You reach the top of the heap, but it's a circle, and you slip on the down side, maybe for years. You get scared.”

“My next film, 'The Prince Of Players,' was Hollywood's first turkey in CinemaScope - when CinemaScope was new and hotter than a pistol.”

“I might run from her for a thousand years and she is still my baby child. Our love is so furious that we burn each other out.”

“I grew up among heroes who went down the pit, who played rugby, told stories, sang songs of war.”

“Let's have days and days of brilliant clarity, etched and limpid, cool and surgical.”

“Little islands are all large prisons: one cannot look at the sea without wishing for the wings of a swallow.”

“I don't have tremendous physical vitality since I had a neck operation, and I'm more aware than I used to be of the tedium of acting.”

“My sister Edith died at the age of 43. She was the youngest sister and the funniest. I had to harrumph and snort a few times to stop the weeping.”

“I always speak Welsh to my family.”