Richard Burton

“They lard their lean books with the fat of others work.”

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

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

“Indeed he knows not how to know who knows not also how to un-know.”

“The only nice poets I've ever met were bad poets, and a bad poet is not a poet at all - ergo, I've never met a nice poet.”

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

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

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

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

“A man that hoards up riches and enjoys them not, is like an ass that carries gold and eats thistles.”

“Anyone can play Henry VIII. I mean, even Robert Shaw... has played it.”

“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.”

“You may be as vicious about me as you please. You will only do me justice.”

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

“I've got the weight of a rather tempestuous life to carry.”

“How drab people are, especially from the press.”

“This diamond has so many carats it's almost a turnip.”

“I always speak Welsh to my family.”

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

“How do you live with one person for 13 years and another for eight and find both as alien as strangers?”