Richard Burton Quotes

1. I drank too much, smoked too much and made love too much.

2. 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.

3. God put me on this earth to raise sheer hell.

4. I have always felt that the camera hasn't liked me. I'm a stage animal. I have to be big and loud, and the camera needs you to be small and naturalistic and subtle; much more naturalistic. I'm as subtle as a buffalo stampede.

5. My father said all actors were homosexuals. That is nonsense, of course. But perhaps most actors are latent homosexuals and we cover it with drink. I was a homosexual once, but not for long. But I tried it. It didn't work so I gave it up.

6. Once you have a drink problem, you always have one. Once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic. But, er, I'm not quite sure whether I am one or not. I think I'm within striking distance of being one.

7. Marlon Brando has yet to learn to speak. He should have been born two generations before and acted in silent films.

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





9. I got away from the valley and proceeded to drink myself to death elsewhere.

10. The unfortunate thing is that everyone wants me to play a prince or a king...I'm always wearing a nightdress or a short skirt or something odd. I don't want to do them, I don't like them, I hate getting made up for them, I hate my hair being curled in the mornings, I hate tights, I hate boots, I hate everything. I'd like to be in a lounge suit, I'd like to be a sort of Welsh Rex Harrison and do nothing except lounge against a bar with a gin and tonic in my hand. 

11. The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself.

12. I am the son of a Welsh miner and one would expect me to be at my happiest playing peasants, people of the earth. But in actual fact I'm much happier playing princes and kings. Now whether this is a kind of sublimation of what I would like to be, or something like that, I don't know, but certainly I'm never really very comfortable playing people from the working class.


13. I rather like my reputation, actually, that of a spoiled genius from the Welsh gutter, a drunk, a womanizer; it's rather an attractive image.

14. You haven't heard the real beauty of the Bible until you have heard it in Welsh.

15. If you're going to make rubbish, be the best rubbish in it. I keep telling Larry Olivier that. I chided Olivier for playing a minor role in an epic like "Spartacus", which he's just done. Larry had a dressing room half the size of Tony Curtis' in that film. And he got about half Curtis' money. Well, that's ridiculous. You've got to swank in Hollywood. When I go there I demand two Cadillacs - one for my family - and the best dressing room in the studio. Of course I'm not worth it, but it impresses them.

16. Mark Antony is one of the great roles because it combines some of the best dialogue Shakespeare ever wrote and action; Antony was a man of action.


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

18. (on "The Robe") Rubbish…tastelessly sentimental and badly acted by me.


19. Shakespeare (is) the best way to learn English.


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

21. Generally if you mention the word Shakespeare in Hollywood, everybody leaves the room.

22. As the seventh son of a Welsh miner I knew hardship first hand. I come from the lower depths of the working class. It's true that I now earn one and a quarter of a million dollars per picture, and it sounds strange to say that at heart I am a Communist, but there is no contradiction because I don't exploit others.


23. Everywhere you go, there's somewhere shoving a chair under your bum, and if you take out a cigarette there are eighty-four people jumping up to light it and tell you how wonderful you are. And you know it's not true.

24. (asked why he refused to see his performance in "Cleopatra") Well, I don't want to kill myself.

25. It seems fairly ridiculous for someone of forty-five or fifty to be learning words written by other people, most of which are bad, to make a few dollars.

26. If you're going to make rubbish, be the best rubbish in it.

27. I'm not dedicated, I never was. In a sense I'm totally alienated from the craft that I employ so superficially and successfully.

28. The only thing in life is language. Not love. Not anything else.



29. I get increasingly disenchanted with acting...as the years totter past I find it ludicrous, learning some idiot's lines in the small hours of the night so I can stay a millionaire.

30. I've done the most awful rubbish in order to have somewhere to go in the morning.

31. One big picture is worth ten small ones. The actor who is fortunate enough to get two or possibly three big subjects a year benefits from their long runs. He's never absent long from public view.


32. All I wanted to do was to live, pick up a new Jag, and act at the Old Vic.

33. My real interest in life is the theatre, and I think I've shot my bolt in London as far as the classical roles are concerned. I've played all the parts I think I can play, and one or two that I should have given a miss. But there is nothing left until I'm older and can play parts like Lear.

34. 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.


35. Actors go through cycles - remarkable, weird cycles. There was one period from 1956 to 1961 or so when I couldn't do anything right. My voice went foul, my luck was bad, I chose badly. I thought I had lost what I had, and I nearly retired right then and there.

36. All great art comes from people who are either ugly or have a terrible inferiority complex. I know no one who is beautiful and produces art.





37. I've been in trouble all my life, I've done the most unutterable rubbish, all because of money. I didn't need it - I've never needed money, even as a child, though I came from a very poor family. But there have been times when the lure of the zeros was simply too great.

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

39. As Lee Marvin says, who gives a shit? We're born, we come staggering out the womb, we come searching for death. My father was a Welsh miner, a remarkable man. Tough, powerful. Obese. Short. I come from an enormous family - thirteen children. My eldest sister was having a baby. I didn't understand it. I said: "Will she be all right? Will she live?" My father - he was massively drunk - was worried too. "Never mind," he said, "we're all dying." He talked like an angel. "Even your growing pains are reaching into oblivion."

40. (on Elizabeth Taylor) Elizabeth has great worries about becoming a cripple because her feet sometimes have no feeling in them. She asked if I would stop loving her if she had to spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair. I told her that I didn't care if her legs, bum and bosoms fell off and her teeth turned yellow. And she went bald. I love that woman so much sometimes that I cannot believe my luck. She has given me so much.

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

42. (about being hired to play Marc Antony opposite Elizabeth Taylor in "Cleopatra") Well, I suppose I must don a breastplate once more to play opposite Miss Tits.




43. 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.

44. (on Elizabeth Taylor) At thirty-four she is an extremely beautiful woman, lavishly endowed by nature with a few flaws in the masterpiece: She has an insipid double chin, her legs are too short and she has a slight potbelly. She has a wonderful bosom, though.

45. I still smoke too much. I think it gives my voice an edge.

46. Last Tango in Paris ("Last Tango in Paris") so absolutely revolted and embarrassed me that I didn't know where to look…I said: "I'm sorry, I can't stand it, I have to go". It did not turn me on, it turned me off. For a month I was asexual.

47. (replying to a cable from Laurence Olivier at the height of the "Cleopatra" scandal: "Make up your mind, dear heart. Do you want to be a great actor or a household word?") Both.

48. Richard Burton is now my epitaph, my cross, my title, my image. I have achieved a kind of diabolical fame. It has nothing to do with my talents as an actor. That counts for little now. I am the diabolically famous Richard Burton.

49. My friends are not actors, they are scientists, they are writers. My real gift is writing.

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



51. You can't be at the mercy of fate, you've got to invest so you don't ever need to work again.

52. (on Sophia Loren) She is as beautiful as an erotic dream. Tall and extremely large-bosomed. Tremendously long legs. They go up to her shoulders, practically. Beautiful brown eyes, set in a marvelously vulpine, almost satanic, face.

53. "The Robe" was lousy, but an almighty hit. I was dull as ditchwater and an almighty flop. My next film, "Prince of Players", was Hollywood's first turkey in CinemaScope - when CinemaScope was new and hotter than a pistol. If I'd been able to buttonhole a couple of relatives and persuade a few of the deluded girls I'd done favors for, I'd still have struggled to rustle up nine lost souls to form a fan club.

54. Certainly most movie executives were making love to the starlets. But then, so were most of us actors.

55. (on Elizabeth Taylor) I have a fair choice of women myself if I wish. But I don't wish it. Since Elizabeth, I have seen two. I've a fundamental and basic loyalty. Next year I'll be fifty and I've only been married twice. Yes, I betrayed them both a couple of times, but not mentally, only physically. You see, I may fall in love and it may last six months, but then the affair breaks up. 


56. My father considered that anyone who went to chapel and didn't drink alcohol was not to be tolerated. I grew up in that belief.

57. None of my films has done me any good. I know all epics are awful, but I thought "Alexander the Great" might be the first good one. I was wrong. They cut it about - played down to the audience. I say if the audience doesn't understand, let 'em stay ignorant.

58. I was up to, I'm told, because, of course, you don't remember if you drink that much, about two-and-a-half to three bottles of hard liquor a day. Fascinating idea, of course, drink on that scale. It's rather nice to have gone through it and to have survived.


59. An actor is something less than a man, while an actress is something more than a woman.

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

61. Although I like to be thought of as a tough rugby-playing Welsh miner's son, able to take on the world, the reality is that this image is just superficial. I am the reverse of what people think.


62. (on Elizabeth Taylor) I love her, not for her breasts, her buttocks or her knees but for her mind. It is inscrutable. She is like a poem.

63. (on Elizabeth Taylor) The most astonishingly self-contained, pulchritudinous, remote, removed, inaccessible woman I had ever seen.

64. (in 1963, about adultery) The minute you start fiddling around outside the idea of monogamy, nothing satisfies anymore.


65. (on Frankie Howerd) If I had his talent, I'd drop Shakespeare tomorrow.

66. (about his love of reading) Home is where the books are.

67. (on "Staircase") I believe in this film absolutely. It is a kick against the system.

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

69. Travelers are like poets. They are mostly an angry race.

70. I almost replaced Sean Connery as James Bond in "Thunderball". This was before Sean played Bond. My friend, the Irish producer Kevin McClory, wanted me. Kevin worked for Michael Todd on "Around the World in Eighty Days" and I was impressed with his Irish rebelliousness. We Welsh have that, too, but not quite like the Irish, who transfuse it into their blood on the same day they are born. McClory promised (Alfred Hitchcock) would direct and I had great hopes for the project. It fell through, of course - and later Kevin made a bloody fortune, when Sean was Bond. I wonder sometimes how it might all have turned out. (Ian Fleming) was big on me for the role. Stewart Granger was next in line.

71. And I'm too old. I'm now thirty-six. And I look about 5'2". I'm 5'10" but I look smaller. It's because I'm so wide or my head's too big or something.

72. I'm a reader, you know. I was corrupted by Faust. And (William Shakespeare). And Marcel Proust. And Ernest Hemingway. But mostly I was corrupted by Dylan Thomas. Most people see me as a rake, womanizer, boozer and purchaser of large baubles. I'm all those things depending on the prism and the light. But mostly I'm a reader. Give me Agatha Christie for an hour and I'm happy as a clam. The house in Celigny some day will cave in under its own weight from the books. I hope I'm there when it does. One hundred six years old. Investigating the newest thriller from (John le Carré) or a new play from Tennessee Williams.

73. I've played the lot: a homosexual, a sadistic gangster, kings, princes, a saint, the lot. All that's left is a Carry On film. My last ambition.

74. I played a sex-drenched doctor in "The Bramble Bush". It was the worst picture I ever made, if you don't count "Ice Palace". That one was based upon a very weak novel by Edna Ferber. Both pictures for Warner Brothers. Jack L. Warner told the press I had no sex appeal. Then Elizabeth came along. All changed after that. Suddenly, Eddie Fisher didn't have sex appeal. And I did. It's a crazy world for a Welsh coal miner's son born in November 1925.

75. I have to think hard to name an interesting man who does not drink.

76. Albert Finney is the greatest actor in the world. Then Peter O'Toole. Marlon Brando. Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud belong to another time and place. They're immortal, but remote from the rest of us. Sean Connery is vastly underrated. I would like to do a play with Michael Caine, whom I respect. I like Alan Bates. Frank Finlay is a hard man to follow in the second act. Unbeatable self-discipline.

77. (on Julie Andrews, his co-star in "Camelot") Every man I know who knows her is a little bit in love with her.





78. (on "Alexander the Great") I knew all epics are crap but I felt this one could be different. How could I have been so wrong?


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