Tallulah Bankhead Quotes

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

They aren't making mirrors like they use to.

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

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

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

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

I'd rather be strongly wrong than weakly right.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

[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.

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

Of course cocaine is not adictive, darling. I should know, I've been doing it for years.

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

[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.

There is less in this than meets the eye.

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.'

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.

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.

I'm as pure as the driven slush.

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.

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

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

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

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?

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

Acting is a form of confession.