Quotes from Peter Ustinov

Sex is a conversation carried out by other means. If you get on well out of bed, half the problems of bed are solved.

Parents are the bones on which children cut their teeth.

Critics search for ages for the wrong word, which, to give them credit, they eventually find.

Intelligent or not, we all make mistakes and perhaps the intelligent mistakes are the worst, because so much careful thought has gone into them

It is youth that has discovered love as a weapon

Unfortunately, the balance of nature decrees that a super-abundance of dreams is paid for by a growing potential for nightmares.

To refuse awards is another way of accepting them with more noise than is normal.

Children are the only form of immortality that we can be sure of.

If the world should blow itself up, the last audible voice would be that of an expert saying it cant be done.

I have three daughters and I find as a result I played King Lear almost without rehearsal.

Monica Seles: I'd hate to be next door to her on her wedding night.

If Botticelli were alive today he'd be working for Vogue.

Men think about women. Women think about what men think about them.

Corruption is nature's way of restoring our faith in democracy.

I was irrevocably betrothed to laughter, the sound of which has always seemed to me the most civilised music in the world.

The habit of religion is oppressive, an easy way out of thought.

I'm convinced there's a small room in the attic of the Foreign Office where future diplomats are taught to stammer.

I am an optimist, unrepentant and militant. After all, in order not to be a fool an optimist must know how sad a place the world can be. It is only the pessimist who finds this out anew every day.

Contrary to general belief, I do not believe that friends are necessarily the people you like best, they are merely the people who got there first.

At the age of four with paper hats and wooden swords we're all Generals. Only some of us never grow out of it.

The truth is an ambition which is beyond us.

A diplomat these days in nothing, but a head waiter who is allowed to sit down occasionally.

By increasing the size of the keyhole, today's playwrights are in danger of doing away with the door.

Did you know that every two hours the nations of this world spend as much on armaments as they spend on the children of this world every year?