Quotes

I've been lucky enough to win an Oscar, write a best-seller-my other dream would be to have a painting in the Louvre. The only way that's going to happen is if I paint a dirty one on the wall of the gentlemen's lavatory.

[on Separate Tables (1958)] They gave me very good lines and then cut to Deborah Kerr while I was saying them.

[during an Academy Award presentation. responding to the unexpected entrance of a streaker] Isn't it fascinating to think that probably the only laugh that man will ever get in his life is by stripping off and showing his shortcomings?

I have a face that is a cross between two pounds of halibut and an explosion in an old clothes closet.

Can you imagine being wonderfully overpaid for dressing up and playing games?

I suppose everybody becomes an actor because they want to be liked. I do enjoy being liked, but I don't work hard at it. I try to do the best I can for my age.

In 40 years I've never been late. They pay me enough--so the least I can do is arrive sober, be on time and know all the jokes.

I make two movies a year to take care of the butcher and the baker and the school fees. Then I try to write, but it's not that easy. Acting is what's easy.

I wonder why it is, that young men are always cautioned against bad girls. Anyone can handle a bad girl. It's the good girls men should be warned against.

You can count on Errol Flynn, he'll always let you down.

The hardest thing in the world to do, for a director, is a comedy. If you do a drama that doesn't quite come off, you may still have a fairly good drama, but if a comedy does not come off, you've got a disaster. Blake [Blake Edwards] takes a big chance every time he does a comedy. There's no covering up with a comedy. They're frightfully hard to write, very difficult to direct, and they're not at all easy to act, as a matter of fact.

[on acting] This isn't work. It's fun. The whole thing is fun. I hear actors say, "I have to go to work tomorrow". Nonsense. Work is eight hours in a coal mine or a government office. Getting up in the morning and putting on a funny mustache, and dressing up and showing off in front of the grown-ups, that's play, and for which we're beautifully overpaid. I've always felt that way. After all, how many people in the world are doing things that they like to do?.

[on Frank Sinatra] So much has been written about Sinatra, of his talent, his generosity, his ruthlessness, his kindness, his gregariousness, his loneliness and his rumored links with the Mob that I can contribute nothing except to say that he is one of the few people in the world I would instinctively think of if I needed help of any sort. I thought of him once when I was in a bad spot; help was provided instantly.

[on Audrey Hepburn] A great lady. It's quite an achievement to spend that long in Hollywood and not become a Hollywood product. She always maneuvered around that--and that takes intelligence. She was always her own person.

[on Marlene Dietrich] Marlene, the most glamorous of all, she was also one of the kindest.

[on Humphrey Bogart] It took a little while to realize that he had perfected an elaborate camouflage to cover up one of the kindest and most generous of hearts. Even so, he was no soft touch and before you were allowed to peek beneath the surface and catch a glimpse of the real man, you had to prove yourself. Above all, you had to demonstrate conclusively to his satisfaction that you were no phony.

[on Lauren Bacall] Betty Bacall was the perfect mate for Bogey [Humphrey Bogart]--beautiful, fair, warm, talented and highly intelligent. She gave as good as she got in the strong personality department. Women and men love her with equal devotion.

[on Errol Flynn] Flynn was a magnificent specimen of the rampant male. Outrageously good looking, he was a great natural athlete who played tennis with Don Budge and boxed with Mushy Callahan. The extras, among whom I had many friends, disliked him intensely.

[on Jack L. Warner] He was a generous host, a big gambler at work and at play, and with superb confidence he put his money where his mouth was.

[on Cary Grant] Cary's enthusiasm made him search for perfection in all things, particularly the three that meant most to him--filmmaking, physical fitness and women.

Actors don't retire. They just get offered fewer roles.

[on why he never divorced Hjördis Genberg] I would like to be remembered as one Hollywood actor who never got divorced.

I thought it would make Hjordis [wife Hjördis Genberg] happy if we adopted a child. We talked to friends about the idea and they thought it would be marvelous. Hjordis said she'd love to adopt a Swedish girl, so we did. Her name was Kristina. [NOTE: The child was in fact Niven's by an affair with an 18-year-old model. Hjordis had to put up with the pretense.]

[In 1980, after 32 years of marriage to Hjördis Genberg, his second wife] She isn't good company, and she can't do anything. What she can do is make herself look very good, and she can arrange flowers. But that's all.

[About the costumes he wore during Bonnie Prince Charlie (1948)] I asked Jack Hawkins to tell me honestly if I looked like a prick. He said, "Yes, and so do I". And he did, too. We all looked like pricks.

[on Greta Garbo] The longer she stayed away, the stronger and stranger the Garbo myth grew.

[on Errol Flynn's alleged pro-Nazism and bisexuality] There is no way Errol could have been a spy--he was way too busy screwing girls. If that answers both questions for you, so be it.

[Telegram to Tony Curtis, his opponent for Best Actor Oscar (1958)] Congratulations, chum, but I want to make one thing crystal clear. Unless someone happens to be looking over my shoulder, I'll be voting for myself.

[on /nm0001224]] I went off to the war in 1939 and I really think Errol suffered because he didn't. He'd done a lot of films about war and these were sometimes laughed at, especially in England. He was parodied as a man who should have been in it, and was most unfairly pilloried because of it. This ate into him. This, compounded with the fact that there was a great place - the war itself - for heroics at that time.

[Greta Garbo] The first naked female my sons ever saw was Greta Garbo, swimming in our pool.

[Hollywood from the 1930s to the early '60s] It was hardly a nursery for intellectuals, it was a hotbed of false values, it harbored an unattractive percentage of small-time crooks and con artists, and the chances of being successful there were minimal," he writes. "But it was fascinating, and if you were lucky, it was fun.