A biography for Tallulah Bankheadhasn’t been written yet.
“Nobody can be exactly me. Sometimes even I have trouble doing it.”
“I'll come and make love to you at five o'clock. If I'm late start without me.”
“It's one of the tragic ironies of the theatre that only one man in it can count on steady work - the night watchman.”
“My heart is as pure as the driven slush.”
“If you really want to help the American theater, don't be an actress, dahling. Be an audience.”
“It's the good girls who keep diaries; the bad girls never have the time.”
“The less I behave like Whistler's mother the night before, the more I look like her the morning after.”
“If I had to live my life again, I'd make the same mistakes, only sooner.”
“I'm as pure as the driven slush.”
“Acting is a form of confusion.”
“I've been called many things, but never an intellectual.”
“Here's a rule I recommend: Never practice two vices at once.”
“I read Shakespeare and the Bible, and I can shoot dice. That's what I call a liberal education.”
“(On seeing a former lover for the first time in years) I thought I told you to wait in the car.”
“I have three phobias which, could I mute them, would make my life as slick as a sonnet, but as dull as ditch water: I hate to go to bed, I hate to get up, and I hate to be alone.”
“Television could perform a great service in mass education, but there's no indication its sponsors have anything like this on their minds.”
“Acting is a form of confession.”
“There is less in this than meets the eye.”
“Nobody can be exactly like me. Even I have trouble doing it.”
“I have been absolutely hag-ridden with ambition. If I could wish to have anything in the world it would be to be free of ambition.”