If I could get a good director to choose me for a picture, I was okay. But they stopped calling me in the mid-70s ... I made a whole bunch of pictures that didn't make any money and people lost interest in me ... Directors take me reluctantly. I feel I'm lucky to be here in the first place and they know it too. I'm a glamour boy, a Hollywood product. I have a TV background and they can point to the silly movies I've made.

[on Love Story (1970)] I didn't worry a lot about whether I was preparing enough for the part. I'm not into study and research much. I just thought about it as a story about a man and a woman and I made sure I looked right. You know, the right scarf, the right sweater.

[when asked how he would like to be remembered, 2011] He was a child to children and a man to men.

I had just put the casket in the hearse and I was watching it drive away when a beautiful blonde woman comes up and embraces me. I said to her, 'You have a drink on you? You have a car?' She said, 'Daddy, it's me - Tatum!' I was just trying to be funny with a strange Swedish woman, and it's my daughter. It's so sick. [in Vanity Fair, admitting to propositioning a woman (who he was unable to recognize as his own daughter) at Farrah Fawcett's funeral]

[on Farrah Fawcett's ongoing cancer battle] It's a love story. I just don't know how to play this one. I won't know this world without her. Cancer is an insidious enemy.

[on Barbra Streisand] The most pretentious woman the cinema has ever known.

I'm as moody and complex and private as anyone I ever knew.

The only time I ever had steady employment was in Peyton Place (1964). Once I was in control of my destiny, I found it very difficult.