Top 136 Quotes & Sayings by Peter O'Toole - Page 3

I love working with young people, which is to me a big kick.

Do you not know that King Kong the first was just three foot six inches tall? He only came up to Faye Wray's belly button! If God could do the tricks that we can do he'd be a happy man!

When my father would come home from the track after a good day, the whole room would light up; it was fairyland. But when he lost, it was black. In our house, it was always either a wake ... or a wedding.

I'm not an actor, I'm a movie star!!!

We all had such larks. Yes, it was hard work but the friendships and the genuine respect we had for one another, that side I shall miss greatly. I've stopped acting, but I don't think I've finished using my voice. I could, and probably will, record the whole of Shakespeare's sonnets. They live at the side of my bed and are my constant companions.

It grieves us to produce work that is not perfect.

People're artists they're doing something, taking a hunk of chaps, giving it some order, some form, and presenting it saying here is my little song and dance, my chaos.

Anything an artist does is to show ourselves as we really are, which is a complex thing. I don't think that one work of Philosophy or Art, or Letters, or Acting, or Middle Playing, or Tightrope Walking, or Flea Circuses has made mankind better, if by better you mean kinder, wiser, more tolerant of each other. One thing self knowledge. Knoticayton: know thyself.

I wish to hazard my soul to opportunity.

If you do not surrender, I shall be forced to shoot you through the head with a rather large bullet.

I don't go for this auto-cannibalism. Very damaging.

In the theater you can chain a blue-assed baboon in the stalls and with a good script, good actors, and a good set you'd have what is called a production. With the cinema someone has to know about lenses and fine things. I have no time for the "auteur de cinema." To me, it's meaningless.

One time in the late '50s, when Peter Finch, Laurence Harvey, and I were all offered the same movie role - the assumption being that we weren't friends - we marched up to producer Dino De Laurentiis's door and declared in unison, 'We don't think we're suitable for the part.'

You talk about auteur de cinema having things in their heads and putting them all across, can you imagine Shakespeare writing screenplays?

It was around 1985 before I heard the news of President Kennedy's assassination.

I became a professional cricket teacher about 20 years ago. I had a son born to me when I was 50, and I thought, he needs someone to bowl to him.