I simply love the camera and it loves me. But the amount of concentration you have to use to feed the camera is so enormous that you`re absolutely ragged at the end of a day after doing something simple - like a look.

[on fans] The local police were always having to come and remove girls from their nesting places under the bushes. Like an orphan girl who twice escaped from a home at Birmingham. We only discovered her because she used the potting shed as a lavatory which seemed to indicate an alien presence. I think we got her fixed up as a kennel maid, which gave her dogs to love in place of me.

[on the Cannes Film Festival] My idea of hell. You see all the people you thought were dead and all the people who deserve to be dead. After a while, you start to think you might be dead, too.

[speaking in 1983] Everyone wants to get into movies, but there aren`t any movies left.

I love the camera and it loves me. Well, not very much sometimes. But we`re good friends.

Childhood for me was basically a backyard, a spade and a bucket of mud with someone to look after you.

I`ve got a good left profile and a very bad right profile. I was the Loretta Young of my day. I was only ever photographed on the left-hand profile.

Living in a tower, however secure it may feel, is hardly a social attribute.

I had my flies ripped so often that eventually, in public, I had to have a side zip... can you imagine anything more humiliating than that?

[on Alain Resnais] Resnais is one of the genius directors, too, however difficult it is to work in his way on a script as complex as Providence (1977). He`s the only poet director I`m aware of.

TV? Never! I don`t want my audience going for a piss or making tea while I`m hard at work.

[on Rex Harrison] He`s the actor I`ve learned most from. Whenever I used to think about how I would play a part I would first think how Rex would approach it.

I`ll only work with new people. If you stick with your contemporaries, you`re dead.

First there was the war and then the peace to cope with, and then suddenly I was a film star. It happened all too soon.

There`s something wrong with actors, we`ve always been a suspect breed. Socially, I find myself more admissible now in England because I`ve written books.

[to Russell Harty during a 1986 interview] But I`m still in the shell, and you haven`t cracked it yet, honey.

[on Simone Signoret] I suppose it is fair to say that I fell hopelessly in love with Simone Signoret the very first time I clapped eyes on her in a modest Ealing film called Against the Wind (1948). I placed her then on the very peak of her profession and as far as I am concerned she has never budged from it and I still love her dearly.

[on Kay Kendall] She was without question the greatest female clown we ever had -- apart from someone like Beatrice Lillie, whom your audience won`t have heard of. Or Cicely Courtneidge.

So I`m in quite the wrong profession obviously.

Geniuses are notoriously loony, because it`s a very fine line between madness and genius.

The camera can photograph thought. It`s better than a paragraph of sweet polemic.

I don`t lose my temper often; about once every twenty years perhaps.

It was said of me recently that I suffered from an Obsessional Privacy. I can only suppose it must be true.

I was as scrawny as a plucked hen. The Rank Organisation did supply me with dumbbells. All I did was put on two sweaters and then put my shirt on.

[speaking in 1979] "The kind of acting I used to do no longer exists because your prime consideration is the budget, running time, the cost - and whether they`ll understand it in Milwaukee.

[1955] It seems to be almost impossible to find in this country the type of role which has made actors of the Brando [Marlon Brando] and James Dean style. Mine has I think some affinity which hitherto I have only been able to employ in the theatre.

[on actress/dancer Jessie Matthews] She was a much greater dancer than Ginger Rogers and I thought a better actress.

If you write about Hollywood, you can only write farce. It`s so way over the top, you can`t believe it. It`s Sunset Blvd. (1950), it really is. And it`s cut-throat at the same time.

Cinema is just a form of masturbation. Sexual relief for disappointed people. Women write and say, "I let my husband do it because I think it`s you lying on top of me".

The kind of acting I used to enjoy no longer exists because your prime consideration is the budget, running time, the cost - and whether they`ll understand it in Milwaukee.

The camera can photograph thought.