[on Anthony Hopkins] He has all those stutters, scratches and coughs and mini-splutters; it's always the same and it's awful. He's a much better actor than that, but these days he always seems to be doing the same irritating, mannered thing. He's forever coughing and spitting and winking and blinking.

[on Dame Thora Hird] An extremely adroit, skillful actress--John Osborne's favorite actress, for what that's worth--with an extraordinary ability, rather like Maggie Smith, to twist on a sixpence from being terribly funny to terribly touching. She's a bit mawkish, sometimes, but a brilliant comedienne. The tops.

[on Laurence Harvey] An appalling man and even more unforgivably, an appalling actor.

[1993, to a journalist about to review his performance in "King Lear"] Enjoy the show, it gets funnier in the second half.

Film acting is difficult to do properly. I remember I once said to George Cukor that I think it's as difficult to be Spencer Tracy as it is to be Laurence Olivier. He said, "Wrong, it's much more difficult to be Spencer Tracy".

[on Tony Richardson] He convinced me (wrongly of course) that anyone can make a movie. All Tony Richardson ever did was come in and ask his cameraman what he should do . . . He was a useless, unpleasant creature.

[on comedian Sonnie Hale] A gross, unfunny person offstage and someone, on the whole, to avoid.

One reason I've never chased after films is that once you become a film star, you can't really stop, because you have to be before the public's eye all the time. I wouldn't care for that. Also, in films the material can't be that good all the time. You have to make mostly bad films, or films that aren't frightfully good. That wouldn't interest me - not that I've ever been offered that opportunity.

[on "Hamlet"] It is undoubtedly the greatest part ever written, but it's so complex. You can't really play it, you just give an opinion of it.

[on "The Method"] I once asked two old Russian actors about the Method, because I'd seen American actors in New York use their version of it and it was so awful, amateur and inept and stupid. And they said to me, "If you have a copy of ['Konstantin Stanislavski' 's] "My Life in Art" or "An Actor Prepares", just take it out and throw it in the river". If it was no use to them, it was certainly of no use to me.