- [his reported last words, upon being asked if he wanted to see one of his movies on television] Absolutely not!
- What do I have to do to prove I can act?
- I love the stage, but after a few months you can get tired. I would rather do three movies than play in one stage hit. I played in four flops in a row when I was about 17 and I was delighted. I was being paid to be trained.
- I keep my family out of my public life because it can be an awful nuisance to them. What's my mother going to tell strangers anyway? That I was a cute baby and that she's terribly proud of me? Nuts. Who cares?
- [on his arrival in Hollywood] I told them I wanted to choose my scripts and my directors myself. "But sweetheart," they said, "you're going to make a lot of mistakes." And I told them, "You don't understand; I want to be free to do so.".
- Good dialogue simply isn't enough to explain all the infinite gradations of a character. It's behavior -- it's what's going on behind the lines.
- I don't want to be labeled as either a pansy or a heterosexual. Labeling is so self-limiting. We are what we do, not what we say we are.
- I feel my real talent lies in directing for my later years.
- [on Marilyn Monroe] Marilyn was an incredible person to act with, the most marvelous I ever worked with and I have been working for 29 years.
- [on Elizabeth Taylor] Liz is the only woman I have ever met who turns me on. She feels like the other half of me.
- [on being born the younger twin] I was always the gentleman. I let my sister see the moon before I did!
- Noah, from The Young Lions (1958), was the best performance of my life. I couldn't have given more of myself. I'll never be able to do it again. Never.
- There are parts of me all over the hospital. They can't find my colon. I know they must have been looking for it for days, but they haven't mentioned it to me because they will think I'll get upset. I don't care. To hell with it.
- My childhood was hobgoblin - my parents traveled a lot. That's all I can remember.
- I watched myself in Red River (1948) and I knew I was going to be famous, so I decided I would get drunk anonymously one last time.
- Look, I'm not odd. I'm just trying to be an actor; not a movie star, an actor.
- The only line that's wrong in William Shakespeare is 'holding a mirror up to nature'. You hold a magnifying glass up to nature. As an actor, you just enlarge it enough so that your audience can identify with the situation. If it were a mirror, we would have no art.
- If I'm not interested in the movie, the audience is not going to be. How can you interest the audience if you're not interested yourself?
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