"I can't act. I have never acted. And I shall never act. What I can do is suspend my audience's power of judgement till I've finished." "God felt sorry for actors, so he gave them a place in the sun and a swimming pool. The price they had to pay was to surrender their talent." "Actors and burglars work better at night." "England is my wife. America is my mistress. It is very good sometimes to get away from one's wife." [On TV commercials] "The last refuge of optimism in a world of gloom." *[On 'sneak previews'] "Let one dim-witted schoolboy scrawl 'lousy' on his card, and the entire studio may be stampeded the following morning in an executive meeting to discuss slicing and revising the picture to shreds. On Hollywood's theory that the customer must know best, the schoolboy's 'lousy' is regarded as the last word in dramatic criticism." "The director's tricks are accomplished by converting plays into spectacles of love, landscape, and lust, and the actors into puppets. Unhappily, a lot of young actors and actresses are destroyed in the process. They are drilled to perfection in a single role, while the director tries to produce performances by direction alone. As a result, they may be ruined for anything beyond the single role." "By temperament, a young actor needs to be mercurial, if nothing else, able to shed misfortunes like a duck shedding water and to magnify a pinpoint of hope into a golden dawn."