- People in America, when listening to radio, like to lean forward. People in Britain like to lean back.
- In America the race is on between its decadence and its vitality, and it has plenty of both.
- Canned music is like audible wallpaper.
- I'm still an Englishman in America. An Irish Lancastrian, really. I don't kid myself that I'm from Arkansas.
- As always, the British shudder at the latest American vulgarity, and then embrace it with enthusiasm two years later.
- [on Mary Pickford] She was the girl every young man wanted to have -- as his sister.
- [on Douglas Fairbanks] Fairbanks' glory, the mystery of his visual imagination, is that he could throw away all the text book tricks on the makeshift apparatus of ordinary life. To Fairbanks the limb of a tree suggests a hocks-off; a narrow lane with high walls is a risky, but workable, set of parallel bars; a spear is a pole to vault with.
- [on Greta Garbo] Every man's harmless fantasy mistress. She gave you the impression that, if your imagination had to sin, it could at least congratulate itself on its impeccable taste.
- On television, if you're getting intimate, you must look in people's eyes, which is why I've never used a teleprompter. You see the camera's eye is the eye of the audience, and you must look into it. For the "Masterpiece Theater" segments. I do six or seven a day, memorizing each one before it's to be filmed.
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