Richard Burton Quotes

22 Sourced Quotes

Little islands are all large prisons: one cannot look at the sea without wishing for the wings of a swallow.

Richard Burton
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.

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

Richard Burton
Monogamy is absolutely imperative. The minute you start fiddling around outside the idea of monogamy, nothing satisfies anymore. Suppose you make love to an exciting woman other than your wife, it can't remain enough to go bed with her there must be something else, something more than the absolute compulsion of the body. But if there is something more, it will eventually destroy either you or your marriage.

Richard Burton
I have always felt that the camera hasn't liked me. I'm a stage animal. I have to be big and loud, and the camera needs you to be small and naturalistic and subtle; much more naturalistic. I'm as subtle as a buffalo stampede.

Richard Burton
I wanted that diamond because it is incomparably lovely. And it should be on the loveliest woman [Elizabeth Taylor] in the world.

Richard Burton
My informants declared that in and about Carson a dead man for breakfast was the rule; besides accidents perpetually occurring to indifferent or to peacemaking parties, they reckoned per annum fifty murders.
On Carson City, Nevada

Richard Burton
I stayed in bed all day yesterday, for instance, while she [Elizabeth Taylor] spent the entire day until well after midnight sitting in the main room, gossiping, etc. And, of course, inevitably sipping away at the drinks... What is more frightening is that she has become bored with everything in life.

Richard Burton
If you're going to make rubbish, be the best rubbish in it.

Richard Burton
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.

Richard Burton
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. He said then he thought he was coming out of a slump.

Richard Burton
She can do everything…there's nothing she can't do... she looks after me so well. Thank God I've found her.'

Richard Burton
If I had a chance for another life, I would certainly choose a better complexion... I rather like my reputation, actually, that of a spoiled genius from the Welsh gutter, a drunk, a womanizer; it's rather an attractive image. When he reached the age of 50, after a five-year career slump. I can only say with Edith Piaf, 'Je ne regrette rien'.

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

Richard Burton
If you're a bad actor, you don't get hired. But if you're a bad doctor, you can still practice medicine.

Richard Burton
She [Elizabeth Taylor] never reads a book, at least not more than a couple of pages at a time... I have always been a heavy drinker but now as a result of this half-life we've been leading I am drinking twice as much. The upshot will be that I'll die of drink while she'll go blithely on in her half-world.

Richard Burton
'Dear Long-wayaway-one,' very antisocial I am when I don't booze. And no fun when you're not around... Do you love me? Do you want to be a lazy Jane and never work again? Once I stopped boozing I have enjoyed not working. But we can't do it though.

Richard Burton
Richard Burton is now my epitaph, my cross, my title, my image. I have achieved a kind of diabolical fame. It has nothing to do with my talents as an actor. That counts for little now. I am the diabolically famous Richard Burton.

Richard Burton
I'm afraid we are temporarily out in the cold, and fallen stars. What is remarkable is that we have stayed up there for so long.

Richard Burton
When I played drunks I had to remain sober because I didn't know how to play them when I was drunk.

Richard Burton
My father considered that anyone who went to chapel and didn't drink alcohol was not to be tolerated. I grew up in that belief.

Richard Burton
Although I like to be thought of as a tough rugby-playing Welsh miner's son, able to take on the world, the reality is that this image is just superficial. I am the reverse of what people think.

Richard Burton