भाव

One of the luckiest things that ever happened to me was to be born with a desperate desire to become an actor. I never remember at any age wanting to be anything else.

[referring to his Oscar-winning role as a brain-damaged mute in Ryan's Daughter (1970)] It was weird. I just thought I'd been wasting my time for the past 55 years learning all these millions of lines, and then getting an Oscar for not speaking.

Ryan's Daughter (1970) is not my best film, but it is the best thing that happened to me, professionally. It brought me the Academy Award, and that meant I could finally be known again as somebody other than Hayley Mills' father.

[in a personal tribute to Noël Coward] I don't know any actor alive today who could get laughs with, apparently, so little effort. You never compromised or went out after our sympathy for one moment.

[on Trevor Howard] He became one of the finest actors we ever had. One of the greatest, and a lovely man with it.

I used to write childish melodramas when I was seven or eight and act them out in the schoolhouse.

[on his first wife Aileen Raymond] We were both young, and I guess we just drifted apart.

[after receiving a Best Supporting Actor Oscar® for his role as Michael, a brain-damaged mute man in Ryan's Daughter (1970)] I was speechless for a year in Ireland, and I'm utterly speechless at this moment.