Richard Burton Quotes
Actor
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 more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself.
Let's have days and days of brilliant clarity, etched and limpid, cool and surgical.
You may be as vicious about me as you please. You will only do me justice.
I abhor mere prettiness.
Every word I write I suspect the next day.
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.
Little islands are all large prisons: one cannot look at the sea without wishing for the wings of a swallow.
An actor is something less than a man, while an actress is something more than a woman.
I've got the weight of a rather tempestuous life to carry.
All the bad things that have ever happened to me have always happened in Rome.
I'm so weak at saying no.
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've made more millions than I can count. But you know, it's a faerie gold - the tax people take most of it, and the rest goes to people you need to stay alive, places to live, conveyances to get from here to there.
Indeed he knows not how to know who knows not also how to un-know.
The Welsh are all actors. It's only the bad ones who become professional.
I hate myself and my face in particular.
If you're going to make rubbish, be the best rubbish in it.
I grew up among heroes who went down the pit, who played rugby, told stories, sang songs of war.
I always speak Welsh to my family.
How terrible a thing time is.
When I played drunks I had to remain sober because I didn't know how to play them when I was drunk.
Warren Beatty seems very self-conscious and actory.
What an extraordinary world it is.
You've got to swank in Hollywood.
Anyone can play Henry VIII. I mean, even Robert Shaw... has played it.
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.
I've done the most awful rubbish in order to have somewhere to go in the morning.
Sometimes I am so much my father's son that I give myself occasional creeps.
My next film, 'The Prince Of Players,' was Hollywood's first turkey in CinemaScope - when CinemaScope was new and hotter than a pistol.
How do you live with one person for 13 years and another for eight and find both as alien as strangers?
'The Robe' was lousy but an almighty hit. I was dull as ditchwater and an almighty flop.
It is impossible to tell you what is consisted in the act of love.
I am writing to please myself, though there is a feeling in some place in my head that this may be publishable. I haven't been writing for nothing.
I didn't speak English until I was ten, when Philip Burton, the schoolmaster who became my guardian, took me under his wing.
They lard their lean books with the fat of others work.
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.
I am as dispassionate as it is possible for a human being to be and not be a machine.
If I had a chance for another life, I would certainly choose a better complexion.
This diamond has so many carats it's almost a turnip.
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 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.
How drab people are, especially from the press.