Patrick Macnee Quotes

Accomplishment is such a patronizing, dangerous word, isn't it? I haven't really accomplished anything. The most accomplished thing I've done is to have lived this long - 81.

Linda Thorson was a great actress with a great body, but she arrived just as 'The Avengers' was losing its appeal.

So I find the fascination, the love, the incredible skill and everything to do with acting, writing plays, and doing them, just darling. Lovely. I love actors.

I'm not afraid of death. What's to fear? Once you're dead, that's it. Nothing. I don't believe in heaven or hell. That's baloney. What matters is the here and now. Yes, I'm 88, and there are things I can't do: I can't run a race or climb Everest. But isn't life magnificent?

And there was a very famous man called Michael Powell, who probably is the greatest director all round, except possibly a couple of men.

The radio even weren't allowed to say there was a Holocaust and people were being killed right, left and center in these terrible camps.

Well, you know, I was through the whole of the Second World War and saw all my friends killed.

Retirement's the most wonderful thing. I get to enjoy all the things I never stopped to notice on the way up. After an extraordinary life, it's time to enjoy my retirement.

I mean, everyone says Citizen Kane. It isn't that great, anyway. And Orson Welles I knew well, of course. He made other incredible films that no one would let him make, which were much better than Citizen Kane, really.

I take great pride in recalling that I could open in a play on Broadway or in London's West End and fill a theatre on the strength of my name - Steed's name.

And in the Second World War, you didn't just read about it in the newspapers because you weren't allowed to read it in the newspapers. It was all censored, you know? So nobody knew what we were doing.

I like most of the Humphrey Bogart movies because they had to act then, and they acted very well. Edward G. Robinson is probably the best actor I've ever seen on the movies.

I missed so much of the Swinging Sixties by working. From 1961 to 1969, I got up at 4.30 A.M., a car came for me at 5.30 A.M., and I was taken to our studio at Teddington or Elstree, and we filmed until I got home at 9.30 P.M., five days a week.

It doesn't work that way, you know, because most parts that you think you'd do well, most other people don't. So they offer you something - The Avengers is a good example ... I fitted into that because I came from that sort of background. It's not even acting.

If I was Sean Connery, I would have been macho.

But I did an awful lot of work in Hollywood, and in New York for that matter.

The only danger about websites, you know, is people who remember something you did or said thirty or forty years ago, and bring it up against you, so you're going for a job and you don't get it.

And that's what happened to that show. It started ordinary, it started really rather bad. As I said, there was a review that said, really, we think the commercials are better than the show. And then it gradually developed.

Who'd give up sunny California for the grey old Earls Court Road? I'm looking out at blue skies and the mountains and trees, and it's so beautiful.

Television has some lovely aspects to it - and some ghastly aspects - but the theater itself was a wonderful invention.

I really think I'd have enjoyed the life of a Regency buck.

These things don't just come, arrive and settle like a bird picking up a few bits of crumbs. They develop. I think the best word for these things is develop. They develop because of the human beings who just happen to be there at the time.