Quotes

[to a critic who negatively reviewed one of his performances] Your review hurt me! I cried all the way to the bank!

Too many young performers have forgotten that the most important part of show business is not the second word, it's the first. Without the show there's no business.

[commenting on one of more famous lines] You know that bank I cried all the way to? I bought it!

[from his 1973 autobiography] Youthfulness, I guess, will always remain the thing that fans want to see in their favorite performers. They don't like to see them grow old. Possibly because it reminds them that the same thing is happening to them.

[on stage at one of his shows] I didn't get dressed like this to go unnoticed.

[about playing Radio City Music Hall in the Easter show] You can have either the Resurrection or you can have Liberace. But you can't have both.

[asked how he could play the piano while wearing so many rings] Very well, thank you.

What's better than roses on your piano? Tulips on your organ.

[at the 1982 Academy Awards] I made my greatest contribution to motion pictures years ago. I stopped making them.

[asked what he did with the money he won in a libel suit against the "London Daily Mirror" in 1959] I cried all the way to the bank!

Gee, you've been such a wonderful audience that I don't like to take your money. But I will!

Of course, I couldn't go out in the street in clothes like this, I'd get picked up. Come to think of it, it might be fun.

The difference between men and boys is the price of their toys.

[to his manager Seymour Heller in late 1986] If my fans or the public ever found out that I'm gay or that I have AIDS . . . that's all they'll ever remember about me. I don't want to be remembered as "just another queer" who died of AIDS.