Quotes from Richard Burton

I hate myself and my face in particular.

I don't have tremendous physical vitality since I had a neck operation, and I'm more aware than I used to be of the tedium of acting.

I grew up among heroes who went down the pit, who played rugby, told stories, sang songs of war.

Warren Beatty seems very self-conscious and actory.

Let's have days and days of brilliant clarity, etched and limpid, cool and surgical.

I'm so weak at saying no.

Anyone can play Henry VIII. I mean, even Robert Shaw... has played it.

I am writing to please myself, though there is a feeling in some place in my head that this may be publishable. I haven't been writing for nothing.

The only nice poets I've ever met were bad poets, and a bad poet is not a poet at all - ergo, I've never met a nice poet.

This diamond has so many carats it's almost a turnip.

He dare not come in company, for here he should be misused, disgraced, overshoot himself in gesture or speeches or be sick; he thinks everyman observes him.

I've done the most awful rubbish in order to have somewhere to go in the morning.

False friendship, like the ivy, decays and ruins the walls it embraces; but true friendship gives new life and animation to the object it supports.

I've got the weight of a rather tempestuous life to carry.

The Welsh are all actors. It's only the bad ones who become professional.

I always speak Welsh to my family.

How drab people are, especially from the press.

This diamond has so many carats it's almost a turnip.

I've made more millions than I can count. But you know, it's a faerie gold - the tax people take most of it, and the rest goes to people you need to stay alive, places to live, conveyances to get from here to there.

How strange are the tricks of memory, which, often hazy as a dream about the most important events of a man's life, religiously preserve the merest trifles.

What an extraordinary world it is.

They lard their lean books with the fat of others work.

How terrible a thing time is.

I didn't speak English until I was ten, when Philip Burton, the schoolmaster who became my guardian, took me under his wing.