Peter O'Toole Quotes

If I'm not at my study by 10:00, 10:30, forget it, I can't write a word.

I'm not an actor, I'm a movie star.

I'm the most gregarious of men and love good company, but never less alone when alone.

Many years ago I sent an old, beloved jacket to a cleaner, the Sycamore Cleaners. It was a leather jacket covered in Guinness and blood and marmalade, one of those jobs ... and it came back with a little note pinned to it, and on the note it said, 'It distresses us to return work which is not perfect.' So that will do for me. That can go on my tombstone.

My dad went at 86. A car killed him. He was crossing the road.

The script sits in front of you. The writer's translated into ink what is in his spirit and his soul and his mind. Bum. [Thumps table.] I come along, I pick it up, and the ink goes into my eyes, into my mind, into my body, flows around and that part starts to inhabit me. And I know a good part when I see one.

The only thing I've ever been interested in teaching anyone in life is cricket.

I loved doing My Favorite Year, which was great fun, and The Ruling Class, which I made with all my chums.

I've never looked for women. When I was a teenager, perhaps.

Being sober for so many years is getting interesting.

Do.As.Thou.Wilt.

I know nothing at all about women. They are an amazing, beautiful mystery.

I had a son born to me when I was 50, and I thought, 'He needs someone to bowl to him.'

An Oscar is a symbol that is known in every corner of the world.

I can't stand light. I hate weather. My idea of heaven is moving from one smoke-filled room to another.

My dear sir, it haunted me for the rest of my life.

In my day England, Scotland, Wales had 80 drama schools. There are none left. So there's no training, no discipline.

For me, life has either been a wake or a wedding.

I can make the best French toast.

There's always a hunger, when you're young, to go from peak to peak and avoid the valleys.

I have no memories I'm prepared to share with you.

My father was a racetrack bookie.

I have no intention of uttering my last words on the stage. Room service and a couple of depraved young women will do me quite nicely for an exit.

I woke up one morning to find I was famous. I bought a white Rolls-Royce and drove down Sunset Boulevard, wearing dark specs and a white suit, waving like the Queen Mum.

Omar Sharif and I spent nine months in the desert, day after day for nine months.

There are only three indispensable things: the audience, the actor and the author. The rest is dross.

Everyone praises Sachin Tendulkar. He may be a genius in his own right but in my book, Rahul Dravid is the artist. Dravid's defence tactics, his strokes, his cuts, his grace are truly amazing. I'd like to meet the chap sometime and take my hat off to him.

There is a legend. And to protest is daft.

I will not be a common man. I will stir the smooth sands of monotony. I do not crave security. I wish to hazard my soul to opportunity.

I will not be an ordinary man, because I have a right to be extraordinary.

All the minor sports injuries you acquire over the years begin to multiply like flies when you get over 70.

Question: How do you know you're God? Answer: Simple. When I pray to him, I find I'm talking to myself.

I put steam on the table by being an actor. That is how I live. The longer I live, the more expensive it becomes. So I do my work. And I can't be immensely picky. How many beautiful scripts come in one's lifetime? I have had more than anybody, practically.

My own favorite is something called Rogue Male.

I once knew a fellow who committed robbery with violence, and he was sentenced to a long prison stretch and 12 strokes of the cat. He'd been injured during the robbery, so they put him in hospital to make him better so that they could make him worse. During the administration of the cat, he fainted after six strokes, and the doctor put him in hospital again. And he got very friendly with the nurses and the doctors, and after a while they got him well enough to go back and take the next six strokes. I saw him afterward and I said: "Oh, Jesus - that bloody law, that bloody judge!" But he said: "I don't want the fellow who made the law, and I don't want the fellow who passed the sentence. All I want is the fellow who held the bloody whip.

I'm Irish. That means I'm Catholic. But, truth is, now I'm a retired Christian.

A victory? What have we won? We've won a rock in the middle of a wasteland, on the shores of a poisoned sea.

If you can't do something willingly and joyfully, then don't do it.

I never found it easy to learn my lines. It was slog, slog, slog.

The good parts are the people who don't make do. They're the interesting people. Lear doesn't make do.

I did quite enjoy the days when one went for a beer at one's local in Paris and woke up in Corsica.

I'm a professional and I'll do anything - a poetry reading, television, cinema, anything that allows me to act.

I've played farce on the stage, but I have never played any sort of comedy on the screen.

Always a bridesmaid never a bride my foot!

I've done everything that's possible to be done.

No one ever watched competitive swimming.

My plumbing is no one's business but my own.

It's my job, it's what I do, it's what I'm on earth to do and it's who I am.

Acting has been described as farting about in disguise.

It distresses us to return work which is not perfect.

I'm a working stiff, baby, just like everybody else.

Marriage is forever. It's like cement.

I love working with the young.

I'm not from the working class. I'm from the criminal class.

Money is always a pressure.

We were doing it under the most extraordinary circumstances, but the first out of the tent in the morning would be David Lean. He said to me on the very first day of shooting, Pete, this is the beginning of a great adventure.

If you do not surrender, I shall be forced to shoot you through the head with a rather large bullet.

The common denominator of all my friends is that they're dead.

Public crucifixion is no fun.

It is time for me to chuck in the sponge. To retire from films and stage. The heart for it has gone out of me: it won't come back.

I suggest that an education and reading and facts aren't bad things on which to ponder a few notions.

He's a scoundrel, young Brad Pitt, who led me, his elderly colleague, astray more than once.

I found him perhaps the least terrifying man I've ever met in the theater - because at first glance I could see through him and he could see through me, and he knew that I knew that he knew. Look, love, I've been bullied all my life by bigger experts than Larry Olivier, I can assure you, and he's just got to get in line.

Actors have given up their clout. Now decision making is in the hands of lighting men, designers, bankers, special-effects people. We need to cut that out and just go with the most able trained actors in the business.

It was around 1985 before I heard the news of President Kennedy's assassination.

I take whatever good part comes along.

Every three or four years, I'm hot again.

It's very inconvenient because every time I finish, let's say, a chapter of a book, I think I'm going to ring Richard and then realize: Oh, Christ, I've buried him. I buried him last year.

The only exercise I take is walking behind the coffins of friends who took exercise.

No one should ever know where conduct ends and acting begins. Conduct unbecoming. That's what acting is.

Right after I left drama school, I had a job.

One time in the late '50s, when Peter Finch, Laurence Harvey, and I were all offered the same movie role - the assumption being that we weren't friends - we marched up to producer Dino De Laurentiis's door and declared in unison, 'We don't think we're suitable for the part.'

I had a pretty hilariously gloomy few years in the '70s.

I've stopped acting, but I don't think I've finished using my voice. I could, and probably will, record the whole of Shakespeare's sonnets. They live at the side of my bed and are my constant companions.

Writing is a kind of performing art, and I can't sit down to write unless I'm dressed. I don't mean dressed in a suit, but dressed well and comfortably and I have to be shaved and bathed.

My life is littered with copies of Moby Dick.

I quite like being old.

I can't stand light. I hate weather.

When did I realize I was God? Well, I was praying and I suddenly realized I was talking to myself.