"I'll only work with new people. If you stick with your contemporaries, you're dead." "I was as scrawny as a plucked hen. The Rank organisation did supply me with dumb-bells. All I did was put on two sweaters and then put my shirt on." "I love the camera and it loves me. Well, not very much sometimes. But we're good friends". "First there was the war and then the peace to cope with, and then suddenly I was a film star. It happened all too soon." "Childhood for me was basically a backyard, a spade and a bucket of mud with someone to look after you." "Geniuses are notoriously loony, because it's a very fine line between madness and genius." "TV? Never! I don't want my audience going for a piss or making tea while I'm hard at work." "Cinema just a form of masturbation. Sexual relief for disappointed people. Women write and say: 'I let my husband do it because I think it's you lying on top of me'." "There's something wrong with actors, we've always been a suspect breed. Socially, I find myself more admissable now in England because I've written books." [speaking in 1979] "The kind of acting I used to do no longer exists because your prime consideration is the budget, running time, the cost - and whether they'll understand it in Milwaukee." "If you write about Hollywood, you can only write farce. It's so way over the top, you can't believe it. It's Sunset Boulevard, it really is. And it's cut-throat at the same time." [speaking in 1983] "Everyone wants to get into movies, but there aren't any movies left." "I've got a good left profile and a very bad right profile. I was the Loretta Young of my day. I was only ever photographed on the left-hand profile." "I simply love the camera and it loves me. But the amount of concentration you have to use to feed the camera is so enormous that you're absolutely ragged at the end of a day after doing something simple - like a look." [on fans] "The local police were always having to come and remove girls from their nesting-places under the bushes. Like an orphan girl who twice escaped from a home at Birmingham. We only discovered her because she used the potting shed as a lavatory which seemed to indicate an alien presence. I think we got her fixed up as a kennel maid which gave her dogs to love in place of me." [on the Cannes Film Festival] "My idea of hell. You see all the people you thought were dead and all the people who deserve to be dead. After a while, you start to think you might be dead, too." "It seems to be almost impossible to find in this country the type of role which has made actors of the Brando & James Dean style, with whose school of acting mine has I think some affinity which hitherto I have only been able to employ in the theatre." (1955) "But I'm still in the shell, and you haven't cracked it yet, honey." - Bogarde to Russell Harty during a 1986 interview