I didn't speak English until I was ten, when Philip Burton, the schoolmaster who became my guardian, took me under his wing.
— Richard Burton
'The Robe' was lousy but an almighty hit. I was dull as ditchwater and an almighty flop.
I've got the weight of a rather tempestuous life to carry.
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.
If I had a chance for another life, I would certainly choose a better complexion.
Anyone can play Henry VIII. I mean, even Robert Shaw... has played it.
Every word I write I suspect the next day.
Sometimes I am so much my father's son that I give myself occasional creeps.
How do you live with one person for 13 years and another for eight and find both as alien as strangers?
Let's have days and days of brilliant clarity, etched and limpid, cool and surgical.
Little islands are all large prisons: one cannot look at the sea without wishing for the wings of a swallow.
I've done the most awful rubbish in order to have somewhere to go in the morning.
This diamond has so many carats it's almost a turnip.
When I played drunks I had to remain sober because I didn't know how to play them when I was drunk.
You may be as vicious about me as you please. You will only do me justice.
You've got to swank in Hollywood.
How drab people are, especially from the press.
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.
I'm so weak at saying no.
I grew up among heroes who went down the pit, who played rugby, told stories, sang songs of war.
All the bad things that have ever happened to me have always happened in Rome.
I abhor mere prettiness.
It is impossible to tell you what is consisted in the act of love.
Warren Beatty seems very self-conscious and actory.
I hate myself and my face in particular.
A man that hoards up riches and enjoys them not, is like an ass that carries gold and eats thistles.
The Welsh are all actors. It's only the bad ones who become professional.
They lard their lean books with the fat of others work.
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.
The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself.
My next film, 'The Prince Of Players,' was Hollywood's first turkey in CinemaScope - when CinemaScope was new and hotter than a pistol.
I always speak Welsh to my family.
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.
You reach the top of the heap, but it's a circle, and you slip on the down side, maybe for years. You get scared.
My sister Edith died at the age of 43. She was the youngest sister and the funniest. I had to harrumph and snort a few times to stop the weeping.
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.
How terrible a thing time is.
What an extraordinary world it is.
I am as dispassionate as it is possible for a human being to be and not be a machine.
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.
An actor is something less than a man, while an actress is something more than a woman.
Indeed he knows not how to know who knows not also how to un-know.
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.
If you're going to make rubbish, be the best rubbish in it.
