A person who is keen to shake your hand usually has something up his sleeve.
Sir Alec Guiness
Imagination, industry, and intelligence -- the three I s -- are all indispensable to the actress, but of these three the greatest is, without doubt, imagination.
Ellen Terry
Friendship is one of the most tangible things in a world which offers fewer and fewer supports.
Kenneth Branagh
Tempt not a desperate man.
Neil Tennant
I have to act to live.
Sir Lawrence Olivier
The world is growing old;
Who would not be at rest and free
Where love is never cold?
Frederick Willaim Faber
There are no small number of people in this world who, solitary by nature, always try to go back into their shell like a hermit crab or a snail.
Anton Chekhov
O God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains!
Othello
We are merely the stars tennis-balls, struck and bandied which way please them.
John Webster
Sometimes it's necessary to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly.
Edward Albee
I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.
Alan Bennett
I write about violence as naturally as Jane Austen wrote about manners. Violence shapes and obsesses our society, and if we do not stop being violent we have no future.
Edward Bond
Brevity is the soul of wit.
William Shakespeare
One way of looking at speech is to say it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness.
Harold Pinter
You've got to perform in a role hundreds of times. In keeping it fresh one can become a large, madly humming, demented refrigerator.
Sir Ralph Richardson
I was in hospital once. There was a man in another ward, dying of throat cancer. In the silence, I could hear his screams continually. That's the only kind of form my work has.
Samuel Beckett
A successful artist of any kind has to work so hard that she is justified in refusing to lay down her sceptre until she is placed on the bier.
Dame Edith Evans
Corruption is nature's way of restoring our faith in democracy.
Peter Ustinov
A book is worth a few francs; we Germans can afford to destroy those. We all may not appreciate artistic merit, but cash value is another matter.
Paul Scofield
There is nothing enduring in life for a women except what she builds in a man's heart.
Judith Anderson
A fact is like a sack - it won't stand up if it's empty. To make it stand up, first you have to put in it all the reasons and feelings that caused it in the first place.
Luigi Pirandello
My name is Sherlock Holmes. It is my business to know what other people don't know.
Sherlock Holmes
If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.
Orson Welles
It is never too late with us, so long as we are aware of our faults and bear them impatiently.
Jacobi
Give them pleasure--the same pleasure they have when they wake up from a nightmare.
Alfred Hitchcock
Nurture your mind with great thoughts. To believe in the heroic makes heroes.
Benjamin Disraeli
Pride defeats its own end, by bringing the man who seeks esteem and reverence into contempt.
Henry Bolingbroke
In the course of an average lifetime anyone growing up in a house with such a clock will hear the tune over a million times.
Dudley Moore
Reality is something you rise above.
Liza Minnelli
But what is the greatest evil? If you are going to epitomize evil, what is it? Is it the bomb? The greatest evil that one has to fight constantly, every minute of the day until one dies, is the worse part of oneself.
Patrick Mcgoohan
Never look at the trombones, it only encourages them.
Richard Wagner
People may or may not say what they mean... but they always say something designed to get what they want.
David Mamet
The more you can dream, the more you can do.
Michael Korda
It is vain for you to rise up early, to sit up late, to eat the bread of sorrows for so he giveth his beloved sleep.
Psalm 1272 Bible
I think every American actor wants to be a movie star. But I never wanted to do stupid movies, I wanted to do films. I vowed I would never do a commercial, nor would I do a soap opera -- both of which I did as soon as I left the [Acting] Company and was starving.