“What is the victory of a cat on a hot tin roof? – I wish I knew… Just staying on it, I guess, as long as she can.”

I have found it easier to identify with the characters who verge upon hysteria, who were frightened of life, who were desperate to reach out to another person.

He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.

Enthusiasm is the most important thing in life.

When you’re going through a period of unhappiness, a broken love affair, the death of someone you love, or some other disorder in your life, then you have no refuge but writing.

I can’t stand a naked light bulb, any more than I can a rude remark or a vulgar action.

Life is partly what we make it, and partly what it is made by the friends we choose.

That time is short and it doesn’t return again. It is slipping away while I write this and while you read it, and the monosyllable of the clock is Loss, loss, loss, unless you devote your heart to its opposition.

And it was about then, about that time, that I began to find life unsatisfactory as an explanation of itself and was forced to adopt the method of the artist of not explaining but putting the blocks together in some other way that seems more significant to him. Which is a rather fancy way of saying I started writing.

The most dangerous word in any human tongue is the word for brother. It’s inflammatory.

The only unforgivable sin is deliberate cruelty.

You can be young without money but you can’t be old without it.

Devils can be driven out of the heart by the touch of a hand on a hand, or a mouth on a mouth.

Add to those distortions to our own egos the corresponding distortions in the egos of others, and you see how cloudy the glass must become through which we look at each other.

Not facing a fire doesn’t put it out.

It is planned speeches that contain lies or dissimulations, not what you blurt out so spontaneously in one instant.

The only thing worse than a liar is a liar that’s also a hypocrite!

Everyone gets depressed. But what do you do? You just go through it.

I have no shortage of material or offers, it’s just a case of what you select to do. But I think it’s realistic that my chances of playing Romeo are now over.

The Beatles were from Liverpool. It’s a hard town. The Stones weren’t the hard men. They just dressed up. The Beatles were the hard men.

If you really want your hair to look good, just don’t wash it for a day. That’s my secret.

In 1967, I had my first black girlfriend, and a lot more ever since then. I just don’t understand racism.

I think I’m pretty misunderstood, because I’m not just about football.

I was probably tall as a child, but I just stopped growing.

When you’re doing a film and the majority of the film is cast black, for me, it’s most important to get people to view those movies as just movies, as just good movies.