Tallulah Bankhead Quotes - Page 2

I read Shakespeare and the Bible, and I can shoot dice. That's what I call a liberal education.

I'd rather be strongly wrong than weakly right.

I'm as pure as the driven slush.

Here's a rule I recommend: Never practice two vices at once.

There is less in this than meets the eye.

If you really want to help the American theater, don't be an actress, dahling. Be an audience.

I have three phobias which, could I mute them, would make my life as slick as a sonnet, but as dull as ditch water: I hate to go to bed, I hate to get up, and I hate to be alone.

[On being asked in her later years if she were Tallulah:] I'm what's left of her, dahling.

For acting, darlings, is the world's most perilous trade. Compared with actors, steeple jacks and deep-sea divers lead snug and placid lives.

Will TV kill the theater? If the programs I have seen, save for "Kukla, Fran and Ollie," the ball games and the fights, are any criterion, the theater need not wake up in a cold sweat.

Do you know what my ambition is in life? To be without ambition. As far back as I can remember I've been absolutely hag-ridden. I'd like to attain the state of mind that the Indians call Nirvana. That, for me, would happen if I were free of ambition.

They say it's the good girls who keep diaries. The bad girls never have the time. Me, I just wanna live a life I'm gonna remember even if I don't write it down.

A Republican. A Republican. That's worse than being a goddamned Communist!

[To the man who came up to her at a party and exclaimed effusively, 'Tallulah! I haven't seen you for 41 years!':] I thought I told you to wait in the car.

I'm the foe of moderation, the champion of excess. If I may lift a line from a die-hard whose identity is lost in the shuffle, 'I'd rather be strongly wrong than weakly right.'

It's one of the tragic ironies of the theatre that only one man in it can count on steady work - the night watchman.

Don't think this has taught me a lesson !

No man worth his salt, no man of spirit and spine, no man for whom I could have any respect, could rejoice in the identification of Tallulah's husband. It's tough enough to be bogged down in a legend. It would be even tougher to marry one.

Drink reacts on its practitioners in conflicting ways. One brave can knock off a quart of Scotch and look and act as sober as Herbert Hoover. Another, after three Martinis, makes two-cushion carroms off the chaise lounge as he attempts to negotiate the bathroom.

It's unlikely I'll ever submit to a psychiatrist's couch. I don't want some stranger prowling around through my psyche, monkeying with my id. I don't need an analyst to tell me that I have never had any sense of security. Who has?

It's the good girls who keep diaries; the bad girls never have the time.

I'm not at my best when I moralize or philosophize. Logic is elusive, especially to one who so rarely uses it.

I'm the foe of moderation, the champion of excess.

Wracked with a hangover I do my muttering over a Black Velvet, a union of champagne and stout. Don't be swindled into believing there's any cure for a hangover. I've tried them all: iced tomatoes, hot clam juice, brandy peaches. Like the common cold it defies solution. Time alone can stay it. The hair of the dog? That way lies folly. It's as logical as trying to put out a fire with applications of kerosene.

In the theater lying is looked upon as an occupational disease.