Diarists

"Money was nice but it was not everything to the actor whose greatest joys were words, words, and words."

"Surrounded by his thousand treasured volumes of the Everyman's Library—a gift from Elizabeth—he wrote a letter to Elizabeth and posted it to her home in Bel Air, in Los Angeles. But by the time she received the letter, Burton was dead. He had gone to bed and sometime during the night suffered a cerebral hemorrhage."

"He has a terrific way with women. I don't think he has missed more than half a dozen."

"a born actor...He was serious, charming, with tremendous skill...He chose a rather mad way of throwing away his theater career but obviously he became very famous and a world figure through being a film star. He was awfully good to people and generous."

"Throughout his life he would quote and write in his Notebooks chunks of John Donne, Edward Jones, John Betjeman, Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Dunbar, Shakespeare and his greatest read Dylan Thomas. Dylan became his hero. Sweetly, their paths would later cross and a good friendship would grow."

"A gifted actor who rose to fame due to a combination of raw sex appeal, talent, and his grand romance with Elizabeth Taylor. He was ruggedly handsome and blessed with a mellifluous baritone that could make the reading of a dictionary sound like poetry. Many critics lamented the fact that he didn't live up to his potential."

"Alcoholism began taking its toll on Burton and, perhaps even more insidiously, his disregard for his craft began to tell. He cared little for his movie projects except for the cash they might earn him, a fact he readily acknowledged. Yet, despite his many mediocre movies, his appeal as an actor was undeniable, and he did occasionally soar in a few of his later movies,"

"He was marvellous at rehearsals. There was the true theatrical instinct. You only had to indicate - scarcely even that."

"At two years' old, Richard was scooped up by his sister Cecilia or ‘Cis’, and taken to live with her and her husband, Elfed, and their two daughters Marian and Rhianon, in Port Talbot. He remained forever grateful to Cis throughout his varied and colourful life."

"Richard Burton is now my epitaph, my cross, my title, my image. I have achieved a kind of diabolical fame. It has nothing to do with my talents as an actor. That counts for little now. I am the diabolically famous Richard Burton."

"The magnificent baritone was not merely a voice. It was an orchestra of enormous range and power, its graceful sound seemed to linger on for millions who had heard it on film and stage. Homer must have known someone very much like Richard Burton."

"Although I like to be thought of as a tough rugby-playing Welsh miner's son, able to take on the world, the reality is that this image is just superficial. I am the reverse of what people think."

"Monogamy is absolutely imperative. The minute you start fiddling around outside the idea of monogamy, nothing satisfies anymore. Suppose you make love to an exciting woman other than your wife, it can’t remain enough to go bed with her there must be something else, something more than the absolute compulsion of the body. But if there is something more, it will eventually destroy either you or your marriage."

"It's difficult for me to know where to start with rugby. I come from a fanatically rugby-conscious Welsh miner's family, know so much about it, have read so much about it, have heard with delight so many massive lies and stupendous exaggerations about it and have contributed my own fair share, and five of my six brothers played it, one with some distinction... it's difficu1t for me to know where to start so I’ll begin with the end. The last shall be first, as it is said, so I'll tell you about the last match I ever played in...I had played the game representatively from the age of ten until those who employed me in my profession, which is that of actor, insisted that I was a bad insurance risk against certain dread teams in dead-end valleys who would have little respect, no respect, or outright disrespect for what I was pleased to call my face. What if I were unfortunate enough to be on the deck in the middle of a loose maul...they murmured in dollar accents?"

"[He was] the 12th of 13 children of a hard-drinking but charming coal miner in the village of Pontryhydfen, South Wales...At the age of 10, he was educated under the tutorship of a schoolmaster named Philip Burton who became his guardian and young Richard took his name."

"'Dear Long-wayaway-one,' very antisocial I am when I don't booze. And no fun when you're not around... Do you love me? Do you want to be a lazy Jane and never work again? Once I stopped boozing I have enjoyed not working. But we can't do it though."

"I'm afraid we are temporarily out in the cold, and fallen stars. What is remarkable is that we have stayed up there for so long."

"I wanted that diamond because it is incomparably lovely. And it should be on the loveliest woman [Elizabeth Taylor] in the world."

"She [Elizabeth Taylor] never reads a book, at least not more than a couple of pages at a time... I have always been a heavy drinker but now as a result of this half-life we've been leading I am drinking twice as much. The upshot will be that I'll die of drink while she'll go blithely on in her half-world."

"I might run from her for a thousand years and she is still my baby child. Our love is so furious that we burn each other out."

"I have always felt that the camera hasn't liked me. I'm a stage animal. I have to be big and loud, and the camera needs you to be small and naturalistic and subtle; much more naturalistic. I'm as subtle as a buffalo stampede."

"In the Druid's Rest, Richard won the role in which he made his London debut at age 18. In a wretched part, he showed exceptional ability."

"If you're going to make rubbish, be the best rubbish in it."

"When I played drunks I had to remain sober because I didn't know how to play them when I was drunk."

"The Welsh are all actors. It's only the bad ones who become professional."

"She can do everything…there’s nothing she can’t do...she looks after me so well. Thank God I’ve found her.’"

"My father considered that anyone who went to chapel and didn't drink alcohol was not to be tolerated. I grew up in that belief."

"If you're a bad actor, you don't get hired. But if you're a bad doctor, you can still practice medicine."

"I stayed in bed all day yesterday, for instance, while she [Elizabeth Taylor] spent the entire day until well after midnight sitting in the main room, gossiping, etc. And, of course, inevitably sipping away at the drinks... What is more frightening is that she has become bored with everything in life."

"He was a Welsh coal miner's son whose celebrity was defined as much by his rakish personal life as his remarkable acting skills...One of Britain's greatest Shakespearean stage actors by the age of 27, he offered rugged good looks, a magnetic stage presence and an incomparable voice...[His voice]'with a tympanic resonance so rich and overpowering that it could give an air of verse to a recipe for stewed hare."

"Burton ‘was now the natural successor to Olivier."

"If I had a chance for another life, I would certainly choose a better complexion... I rather like my reputation, actually, that of a spoiled genius from the Welsh gutter, a drunk, a womanizer; it's rather an attractive image. When he reached the age of 50, after a five-year career slump. I can only say with Edith Piaf, 'Je ne regrette rien'."

"You reach the top of the heap, but it's a circle, and you slip on the down side; maybe for years. You get scared. He said then he thought he was coming out of a slump."

"A brimming pool running disturbingly deep...His voice is urgent and keen... He turned interested speculation into awe as soon as he started to speak."

"a monstrous perfectionist and a troubled spirit."

"This diamond has so many carats it's almost a turnip."

"Exceptional ability."

"He should have been in the same rank as Laurence Olivier, but he was very wild and had a scandal around him all the time and I think in theater circles that would not be approved of."

"The terrible consequences of being Jewish that my grandmother faced are ones endured by many ethnic groups, and must always be viewed as a brutal example of man's inhumanity to man. I feel honoured to be able to tell her incredible story of strife and survival."

"We had so little to eat, we were freezing all the time, but the sheer joy of being able to act fed our souls."

"On countless occasions during my spell as an assistant in Naples I heard people say about some newspaper or other: è pagato, it’s paid for, it lies for its client, and then on the following day these very same people who had cried pagato were absolutely convinced by some obviously bogus piece of news in the same paper. Because it was printed in such bold type, and because the other people believed it. … I also know that a part of every intellectual’s soul belongs to the people, that all my awareness of being lied to, and my critical attentiveness, are of no avail when it comes to it: at some point the printed lie will get the better of me when it attacks from all sides and is queried by fewer and fewer around me and finally by no one at all."

"Anyone who took their Catholic faith seriously stood alongside the Jews in mutual, mortal conflict with Hitler."

"Individuals did what they could both to preserve memories of their peoples and record the horrors of the present. At the risk of his life, a Muslim librarian in Sarajevo smuggled out a rare illuminated Jewish manuscript from the fourteenth century from the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina to save it from the Nazis. In Vilna Jewish scholars who were forced by the Nazis to catalogue a vast hoard of seized Jewish documents smuggled out what they could and hid them under floorboards and in walls. Photographers defied Nazi rules to take and preserve pictures of ghettos and concentration camps. When the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, Victor Klemperer, a professor of Romance languages in Dresden, decided that he would continue writing his diary. He makes frequent reference to his health, repeatedly predicting that he was not long for this world. (He died in 1960 at the age of seventy-nine.) Klemperer said of himself that he was not heroic, but to write a record, as he did, of the growing Nazi control over German society and the regime’s many crimes, including the Second World War and the Holocaust, was an act of great courage. ‘I shall go on writing,’ he recorded in 1942. ‘That is my heroism. I will bear witness, precise witness!’ Although the Nazis counted him as Jewish despite the fact that his family had converted to Christianity, he was spared because he was married to an Aryan woman. As the restrictions tightened around him, she was still allowed to travel freely and bravely smuggled the pages of the diary out of the special house for mixed marriages where they were obliged to live. Equally bravely, a woman doctor friend hid the material until the war ended."

"The Third Reich coined only a very small number of the words in its language, perhaps - indeed probably - none at all. . . But it changes the value of words and the frequency of their occurrence, it makes common property out of what was previously the preserve of an individual or a tiny group, it commandeers for the party that which was previously common property and in the process steeps words and groups of words and sentence structures with its poison."

"No, the most powerful influence was exerted neither by individual speeches nor by articles or flyers, posters or flags; it was not achieved by things which one had to absorb by conscious thought or conscious emotions. Instead Nazism permeated the flesh and blood of the people through single words, idioms and sentence structures which were imposed on them in a million repetitions and taken on board mechanically and unconsciously. … Language does not simply write and think for me, it also increasingly dictates my feelings and governs my entire spiritual being the more unquestioningly and unconsciously I abandon myself to it. And what happens if the cultivated language is made up of poisonous elements or has been made the bearer of poisons? Words can be like tiny doses of arsenic: they are swallowed unnoticed, appear to have no effect, and then after a little time the toxic reaction sets in after all."

"For my own part I have never been able to understand how he [Hitler] was capable, with his unmelodious and raucous voice, with his crude, often un-Germanically constructed sentences, and with a conspicuous rhetoric entirely at odds with the character of the German language, of winning over the masses with his speeches, of holding their attention and subjugating them for such appalling lengths of time."

"One must at least know what the lies are."

"Never - never in my whole life - has my head spun as much from a book as it did with Rosenberg’s Myth. Not because his writings were exceptionally profound, difficult to comprehend or emotionally overwhelming, but because Clemens hammered on my head with the book for minutes on end. (Clemens and Weser were the principal torturers of the Jews in Dresden, and they were generally differentiated as the Hitter and the Spitter.) ‘How dare a Jewish pig like you presume to read a book of this kind?’ Clemens yelled. To him it seemed like the desecration of a consecrated wafer. ‘How dare you have a book here from the lending library?’ Only the fact that the volume had demonstrably been borrowed in the name of my Aryan wife, and, moreover, that the sheet of notes which accompanied it was torn up without being deciphered, saved me at the time from the concentration camp."

"Only a year after the collapse of the Third Reich a strangely conclusive piece of evidence can be advanced to support the claim that "fanatical", this key National Socialist term, never really had the sting taken out of it by excessive use. For although scraps of the LTI surface all over the place in contemporary language, "fanatical" has disappeared. From this one can safely conclude that either consciously or subconsciously people remained aware of the real facts of the case all through those twelve years, namely, that a confused state of mind, equally close to sickness and criminality, was for twelve years [of Nazi rule] held to be the greatest virtue."

"But there is no vox populi, only voci populi."