Top 45 Quotes & Sayings by Peter Sellers

When I look at myself, I see a person who strangely lacks what I consider the ingredients of a personality.

When I am searching for a character, I leave myself open, as does a medium. And I think that sometimes you can be inhabited by the spirit of someone who lived at some time or who was a bit like the person you are doing. And maybe they come in and use you as a chance to relive again.

I realise that certain actors project their own image onto the screen - those who are the same on as they are off. But I've never had the necessary statistics to be able to do that sort of thing, and so, anyway, I always wanted to be a character actor.

My ambition in the cinema, since I came across it, was to play Chance... I have realized that ambition, and so I have no more.

I just cannot take mediocrity. I just cannot take it on any level.

I believe in astrology and the spirits. I'm a Virgo myself.

I might have got somewhere with 'The Ladykillers,' but forty minutes were cut. A lot of me was cut with that forty minutes.

Women are more difficult to handle than men. It's their minds.

I try to hop into a new personality as often as I can.

I'm a classic example of all humorists - only funny when I'm working.

To see me as a person on screen would be one of the dullest experiences you could ever wish to experience.

Sometimes I felt glad not to be too close to people. I might have been happier, I suppose. On the other hand, I never had much luck with people over the years.

It depends on whom I'm with. Sometimes I start out in my own voice, and no matter who I'm with, I take on their thing.

A person can destroy me with two words. It can just be the way they say them, the inflection.

I didn't always mean to be an actor. I was carried onto the stage when I was two days old, but I never acted as a child. My parents were stage people.

Our relationship was one of the things that helped break up my first marriage. Miss Loren was always phoning me, and I'd go rushing all over Italy to be with her.

Dad was convinced always that I was going to be a road sweeper.

I've had three marriages end in disaster. Lynne knew the score when she married me. It was always just a matter of time before she became the fourth ex-Mrs. Peter Sellers.

I look in the mirror, and what I see is someone who has never grown up - a crashing sentimentalist who alternates between great heights and black depths.

There is no me. I do not exist. There used to be a me but I had it surgically removed.

Finally, in conclusion, let me say just this.

Conversation like television set on honeymoon... unnecessary.

My mum very much wanted me to go into the theatre.

If you ask me to play myself, I will not know what to do. I do not know who or what I am.

I feel ghostly unreal until I become somebody else again on the screen.

Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room.

Now then, what do we know? One, that Professor Fassbinder and his daughter have been kidnapped. Two, that someone has kidnapped them. Three, that my hand is on fire.

I am here to fix the problem with yer pheaun.

Vocal music is an attempt to take the whole human being and project it into space. It is the ultimate gesture of getting out of yourself. You take a part of you that is most private, most personal, most inward and you hurl it out into space - you project it as far as you can. That gesture of opining this whole region of the body results in an enormous spiritual release, and is felt by other people with tremendous impact.

François: Do you know what kind of a bomb it was? Clouseau: Yes, the exploding kind.

Facts - behind them lies the whole fabric of deductive truth.

We don't want to start a nuclear war unless we really have to, now do we Jack?

Ecstatic over the total annihilation of the Earth, Dr. Strangelove "resurrects" himself, miraculously regaining his ability to walk. His mechanical, robot-like body rises out of his wheelchair, crying exultantly: "Sir! I have a plan. Heh." (He realizes he is standing up.) "Mein Fuehrer, I can walk!"

Is there anybody hiding there in the dark?

Relax, I'll get it. (said to Kato after Clouseau knocks him unconscious)

I writhe when I see myself on the screen. I'm such a dreadfully clumsy hulking image. I say to myself, "Why doesn't he get off? Why doesn't he get off?" I mean, I look like such an idiot. Some fat awkward thing dredged up from some third-rate drama company. I must stop thinking about it, otherwise I shan't be able to go on working.

You'll catch your death of cold. Clouseau: Yes, yes I probably will but . . . its all part of life's rich pageantry, you kneau.

When you have been killed as many times as I have, you get used to it.

Some forms of reality are so horrible we refuse to face them, unless we are trapped into it by comedy. To label any subject unsuitable for comedy is to admit defeat.

You have to live before you die, or you'll die before you live.

If I can't really find a way to live with myself, I can't expect anyone else to live with me.

It won't be easy, that is why I have always failed where others have succeeded.

Clouseau: Does yer dewg bite? Inn Keeper: No Clouseau: Nice Doggy (bends down to pet a dachshund - it snarls and bites him) I thought you said yer dewg did not bite! Inn Keeper: Zat . . . iz not my dog!

Criticism should be done by critics, and a critic should have some training and some love of the medium he is discussing. But these days, gossip-columnist training seems to be enough qualification. I suppose an ability to stand on your feet through interminable cocktail parties and swig interminable gins in between devouring masses of fried prawns may just possibly help you to understand and appreciate what a director is getting at, but for the life of me I can't see how.

To label any subject unsuitable for comedy is to admit defeat.