"When you're my age, you just never risk being ill - because then everyone says, 'Oh, he's done for.'" - Sir John Gielgud at 84 "Like all professions acting has terrible drawbacks. It can be fearfully boring, fearfully unglamorous...But what is fun about the theatre is that we get our prizes while we are alive to enjoy them. We have the pleasure of the audience's reaction, we have the applause, we have the publicity, we have the tribute and the honours and whatever it may be. Much more than we probably deserve." (To Richard Burton on seeing Burton's first Hamlet) "I'll come back and see it when you're better." [on reading bad reviews] "it's wonderful when it isn't you." [During an interview on US television the interviewer asked who had inspired him] "It was during my time at RADA, there was a man who inspired us all. Claude Rains. I don't know what happened to him, I think he failed and went to America." "The only thing I liked about films was looking at the back of my head which otherwise I could only see at the tailor's." If one watches television enough, one begins to perceive the texture with which it's contrived.