"When I played drunks I had to remain sober because I didn't know how to play them when I was drunk." Cable from Laurence Olivier to Richard Burton at the height of the Cleopatra scandal: "Make up your mind, dear heart. Do you want to be a great actor or a household word?" Burton replied: "Both." "I've done the most awful rubbish in order to have somewhere to go in the morning." "My father considered that anyone who went to chapel and didn't drink alcohol was not to be tolerated. I grew up in that belief." [On adultery, in 1963]: "The minute you start fiddling around outside the idea of monogamy, nothing satisfies anymore." "I've played the lot: a homosexual, a sadistic gangster, kings, princes, a saint, the lot. All that's left is a Carry On film. My last ambition." "I have to think hard to name an interesting man who does not drink." "Perhaps most actors are latent homosexuals and we cover it with drink. I was once a homosexual, but it didn't work." "I rather like my reputation, actually, that of a spoiled genius from the Welsh gutter, a drunk, a womanizer; it's rather an attractive image." "You may be as vicious about me as you please. You will only do me justice." When asked why he refused to see his performance in Cleopatra: "Well, I don't want to kill myself." "The only thing in life is language. Not love. Not anything else." "All I wanted to do was to live, pick up a new Jag, and act at the Old Vic." "All great art comes from people who are either ugly or have a terrible inferiority complex. I know no one who is beautiful and produces art." [About Elizabeth Taylor]: "Elizabeth has great worries about becoming a cripple because her feet sometimes have no feeling in them. She asked if I would stop loving her if she had to spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair. I told her that I didn't care if her legs, bum and bosoms fell off and her teeth turned yellow. And she went bald. I love that woman so much sometimes that I cannot believe my luck. She has given me so much." [About his love of reading]: "Home is where the books are." [About being hired to play Marc Antony opposite Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra]: "Well, I suppose I must don a breastplate once more to play opposite Miss Tits." [On Elizabeth Taylor]: "I might run from her for a thousand years and she is still my baby child. Our love is so furious that we burn each other out." [On Elizabeth Taylor]: "At thirty-four she is an extremely beautiful woman, lavishly endowed by nature with a few flaws in the masterpiece: She has an insipid double chin, her legs are too short and she has a slight potbelly. She has a wonderful bosom, though." "A man that hoards up riches and enjoys them not, is like an ass that carries gold and eats thistles." "Richard Burton is now my epitaph, my cross, my title, my image. I have achieved a kind of diabolical fame. It has nothing to do with my talents as an actor. That counts for little now. I am the diabolically famous Richard Burton." "An actor is something less than a man, while an actress is something more than a woman." "Certainly most movie executives were making love to the starlets. But then, so were most of us actors." "I was up to, I'm told, because, of course, you don't remember if you drink that much, about two-and-a-half to three bottles of hard liquor a day. Fascinating idea, of course, drink on that scale. It's rather nice to have gone through it and to have survived." (1974) "The most astonishingly self-contained, pulchritudinous, remote, removed, inaccessible woman I had ever seen." - On Elizabeth Taylor "If I had his talent, I'd drop Shakespeare tomorrow." - On Frankie Howerd "I believe in this film absolutely. It is a kick against the system." - On Staircase