Top 71 Quotes & Sayings by Tallulah Bankhead

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American actress Tallulah Bankhead.

Last updated on September 18, 2024.

Tallulah Brockman Bankhead was an American stage and screen actress. She was a member of the Bankhead and Brockman family, a prominent Alabama political family. Both her grandfather and her uncle served as U.S. senators; her father served as a U.S. representative in Congress for 11 terms, the final two as Speaker of the House of Representatives. Tallulah Bankhead's support of liberal causes, including the budding civil rights movement, broke with her southern contemporaries with their support of white supremacy and segregation as championed by Southern Democrats; she often opposed her own family publicly.

American - Actress | January 31, 1902 - December 12, 1968

Source: Wikipedia

I have been absolutely hag-ridden with ambition. If I could wish to have anything in the world it would be to be free of ambition.

Tallulah Bankhead

It's the good girls who keep diaries; the bad girls never have the time.

Tallulah Bankhead

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

Tallulah Bankhead

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

Tallulah Bankhead

(On seeing a former lover for the first time in years) I thought I told you to wait in the car.

Tallulah Bankhead

I'm as pure as the driven slush.

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

There is less in this than meets the eye.

Tallulah Bankhead

I've been called many things, but never an intellectual.

Tallulah Bankhead

They used to photograph Shirley Temple through gauze. They should photograph me through linoleum.

Tallulah Bankhead

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

Tallulah Bankhead

The less I behave like Whistler's mother the night before, the more I look like her the morning after.

Tallulah Bankhead

Acting is a form of confusion.

Tallulah Bankhead

I'd rather be strongly wrong than weakly right.

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

Acting is a form of confession.

Tallulah Bankhead

I read Shakespeare and the Bible, and I can shoot dice. That's what I call a liberal education.

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

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

Tallulah Bankhead

If I had to live my life again, I'd make the same mistakes, only sooner.

Tallulah Bankhead

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

Tallulah Bankhead

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

Tallulah Bankhead

My heart is as pure as the driven slush.

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 have three phobias which, could I mute them, would make my life as slick as a sonnet, but as dull as ditch water: I hate to go to bed, I hate to get up, and I hate to be alone.

Tallulah Bankhead

I've tried several varieties of sex. The conventional position makes me claustrophobic, and the others either give me a stiff neck or lockjaw.

Tallulah Bankhead

Bette [Davis] and I are good friends. There's nothing I wouldn't say to her face - both of them.

Tallulah Bankhead

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

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 lounge as he attempts to negotiate the bathroom.

Tallulah Bankhead

If I were well behaved, I'd die of boredom.

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

My father warned me about men and booze but he never said anything about women and cocaine.

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

Too many of our countrymen rejoice in stupidity, look upon ignorance as a badge of honor. They condemn everything they don't understand.

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

In my lifetime I've been to bed with men, women, and odd pieces of furniture.

Tallulah Bankhead

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

In the theater lying is looked upon as an occupational disease.

Tallulah Bankhead

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

Tallulah Bankhead

Do you know what my ambition is in life? To be without ambition. As far back as I can remember I've been absolutely hag-ridden. I'd like to attain the state of mind that the Indians call Nirvana. That, for me, would happen if I were free of ambition.

Tallulah Bankhead

Fill what is empty, empty what is full, and scratch where it itches.

Tallulah Bankhead

For acting, darlings, is the world's most perilous trade. Compared with actors, steeple jacks and deep-sea divers lead snug and placid lives.

Tallulah Bankhead

I'm not childless, darling. I am childfree.

Tallulah Bankhead

Whatever you have read I have said is almost certainly untrue, except if it is funny, in which case I definitely said it.

Tallulah Bankhead

I have enemies I've never met - that's fame.

Tallulah Bankhead

[To the critic who wrote a negative review:] I am sitting in the smallest room of the house. Your review is before me. Soon it will be behind me.

Tallulah Bankhead

A Republican. A Republican. That's worse than being a goddamned Communist!

Tallulah Bankhead

Say anything about me, darling, as long as it isn't boring.

Tallulah Bankhead

[On being asked in her later years if she were Tallulah:] I'm what's left of her, dahling.

Tallulah Bankhead

They say it's the good girls who keep diaries. The bad girls never have the time. Me, I just wanna live a life I'm gonna remember even if I don't write it down.

Tallulah Bankhead

They aren't making mirrors like they use to.

Tallulah Bankhead

I'm the foe of moderation, the champion of excess.

Tallulah Bankhead

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

Tallulah Bankhead

I've had a man and I've had a woman, and there's got to be something better.

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

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

Tallulah Bankhead

No man worth his salt, no man of spirit and spine, no man for whom I could have any respect, could rejoice in the identification of Tallulah's husband. It's tough enough to be bogged down in a legend. It would be even tougher to marry one.

Tallulah Bankhead

Don't think this has taught me a lesson !

Tallulah Bankhead

[To the man who came up to her at a party and exclaimed effusively, 'Tallulah! I haven't seen you for 41 years!':] I thought I told you to wait in the car.

Tallulah Bankhead

Going down on a woman gives me a stiff neck, going down on a man gives me lockjaw and conventional sex gives me claustrophobia.

Tallulah Bankhead