Top 69 Tallulah Bankhead Quotes
#2. 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
#4. I have three phobias which, could I mute them,would make my life as slick as a sonnet,but dull as ditch water:I hate to go to bed,I hate to get up and I hate to be alone ...
Tallulah Bankhead
#5. 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
#6. I have three phobias ... : I hate going to bed, get up and hate hate being alone.
Tallulah Bankhead
#7. 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
#8. (On seeing a former lover for the first time in years) I thought I told you to wait in the car.
Tallulah Bankhead
#9. My progress reminded me of the horses in The Whip. They raced at the limit of their speed directly toward the audience. But they raced on a treadmill which canceled out their progress.
Tallulah Bankhead
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. If I had to live my life again, I'd make the same mistakes, only sooner.
Tallulah Bankhead
#13. There have only been two authentic geniuses in the world, Willie Mays and Willie Shakespeare and I think you'd better put Shakespeare first, darling.
Tallulah Bankhead
#14. 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
#17. [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
#18. A frozen daiquiri of a scorching afternoon is soothing. It makes living more tolerable.
Tallulah Bankhead
#21. 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
#22. Nobody can be exactly like me. Sometimes even I have trouble doing it.
Tallulah Bankhead
#23. I have been tight as a tick! Fried as a mink! Stiff as a goat!
Tallulah Bankhead
#26. There have only been two geniuses in the world - Willie Mays and Willie Shakespeare.
Tallulah Bankhead
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#31. I've had a man and I've had a woman, and there's got to be something better.
Tallulah Bankhead
#32. I read Shakespeare and the Bible, and I can shoot dice. That's what I call a liberal education.
Tallulah Bankhead
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. In my lifetime I've been to bed with men, women, and odd pieces of furniture.
Tallulah Bankhead
#38. 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
#39. A Republican. A Republican. That's worse than being a goddamned Communist!
Tallulah Bankhead
#41. I'll come and make love to you at five o'clock. If I'm late start without me.
Tallulah Bankhead
#42. 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
#43. If you know your Bible and your Shakespeare and can shoot craps, you have a liberal education.
Tallulah Bankhead
#47. Working on television is like being shot out of a cannon. They cram you all up with rehearsals, then someone lights a fuse and - .BANG! - there you are in someone's living room.
Tallulah Bankhead
#51. Cocaine isn't habit forming. I should know, I've been using it for years
Tallulah Bankhead
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. They used to photograph Shirley Temple through gauze. They should photograph me through linoleum.
Tallulah Bankhead
#55. It's the good girls who keep diaries; the bad girls never have the time.
Tallulah Bankhead
#56. If you really want to help the American theater, don't be an actress, dahling. Be an audience.
Tallulah Bankhead
#57. 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
#59. My father warned me about men and booze but he never said anything about women and cocaine.
Tallulah Bankhead
#60. [On being asked in her later years if she were Tallulah:] I'm what's left of her, dahling.
Tallulah Bankhead
#62. In the theater lying is looked upon as an occupational disease.
Tallulah Bankhead
#63. I'm not at my best when I moralize or philosophize. Logic is elusive, especially to one who so rarely uses it.
Tallulah Bankhead
#64. Acting is the most insecure of all the trades, the most risky. In their professional lifetime most actors rehearse longer than they play, spend more time traipsing from office to office in search of jobs than they rehearse and play combined.
Tallulah Bankhead
#66. 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
#67. Bette [Davis] and I are good friends. There's nothing I wouldn't say to her face - both of them.
Tallulah Bankhead
#69. The less I behave like Whistler's mother the night before, the more I look like her the morning after.
Tallulah Bankhead
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
