Tallulah Bankhead Quotes

39 Sourced Quotes

Nobody can be exactly like me. Sometimes even I have trouble doing it.

Tallulah Bankhead
The only thing I regret about my past is the length of it. If I had to live my life again I'd make all the same mistakes, only sooner.

Tallulah Bankhead
I've tried several varieties of sex, all of which I hate. The conventional position makes me claustrophobic; the others give me a stiff neck and/or lockjaw.

Tallulah Bankhead
All my life I've been terrible at remembering people's names. I once introduced a friend of mine as Martini. Her name was actually Olive.

Tallulah Bankhead
Cocaine habit-forming? Of course not. I ought to know. I've been using it for years.

Tallulah Bankhead
Don't be taken in by the guff that critics are killing the theater. Commonly they sin on the side of enthusiasm. Too often they give their blessing to trash.

Tallulah Bankhead
I don't know what I am, darling. I've tried several varieties of sex. The conventional position makes me claustrophobic. And the others give me either stiff neck or lockjaw.

Tallulah Bankhead
Observing herself in a mirror after a party given by Dorothy Parker:
The less I behave like Whistler's Mother the night before, the more I look like her the morning after.

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

Tallulah Bankhead
Television could perform a great service in mass education, but there's no indication its sponsors have anything like this on their minds.

Tallulah Bankhead
Only good girls keep diaries. Bad girls don't have the time.

Tallulah Bankhead
I think the Republican party should be placed in drydock and have the barnacles scraped off its bottom.

Tallulah Bankhead
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.

Tallulah Bankhead
There is less in this than meets the eye.

Tallulah Bankhead
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 longue as he attempts to negotiate the bathroom.

Tallulah Bankhead
My father warned me about men and booze, but he never mentioned a word about women and cocaine.

Tallulah Bankhead
I was raped in a driveway when I was eleven. … It was a terrible experience because we had all that gravel.

Tallulah Bankhead
Let's face it, my dears, I have been tight as a tick! Fried as a mink! Stiff as a goat! But I'm no toper. No tosspot.

Tallulah Bankhead
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.

Tallulah Bankhead
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?

Tallulah Bankhead
Of Shirley Temple:
They used to shoot her through gauze. You should shoot me through linoleum.

Tallulah Bankhead
Cocaine isn't habit forming. I should know — I've been using it for years.

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

Tallulah Bankhead
Let's not quibble! 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."

Tallulah Bankhead
I did what I could to inflate the rumor I was on my way to stardom. What I was on my way to, by any mathematical standards known to man, was oblivion, by way of obscurity.

Tallulah Bankhead
I'll come and make love to you at five o'clock. If I'm late, start without me.

Tallulah Bankhead
Before we pursue this delicate subject further it might be wise to define intoxication. If you wake up in bed with your hat on you, it's my guess you may have been addled on retirement.

Tallulah Bankhead
I detest acting because it is sheer drudgery.

Tallulah Bankhead
I don't know what I want.
Nobody knows — or if they do, they don't know for long. I mean, you don't want the same thing long enough for it to be What You Want From Life in capital letters.
Well, maybe some people do. Maybe there's a few simple folks — or maybe a few million, I don't know — who fix their hearts, and their minds, and their everlasting souls on a thing, and keep on all their lives hoping for it. Living for it. Wanting It From Life.
But these are the people who never get it.

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

Tallulah Bankhead