Boris Karloff Quotes

God forbid I should bleed to death, eh? Then you'd have to cart around my rotting corpse. (Kyrian) Could you be any more morbid? Jeez, who was your idol growing up? Boris Karloff? (Amanda) Hannibal, actually. (Kyrian) You're trying to scare me, aren't you? Well, it won't work. I grew up in a house with an angry poltergeist and two sisters who used to conjure demons just to fight them. Buster, I've seen it all and your gallows humor isn't working on me. (Amanda)

The monster was the best friend I ever had.

But what he said was true enough: I had recently destroyed a perfectly good set of wire braces by straightening them to pick a lock. Father had grumbled, of course, but had made another appointment to have me netted and dragged back up to London, to that third-floor ironmonger's shop in Farringdon Street, where I would be strapped to a board like Boris Karloff as various bits of ironmongery were shoved into my mouth, screwed in, and bolted to my gums.

The average introduction to almost any book is somewhat of a bore

Horace, however, had arrayed himself in a Gothic assortment of crushed velvet, black satin, and patent leather that shouldn't have been allowed in my view. He might as well have I AM A VAMPIRE embroidered across the front of his watered-silk waistcoat. An outfit like that is going to get him staked one of these days; it's exactly what Boris Karloff would have worn, if he had joined the cast of Rocky Horror Motion Picture Show.

To write your dreams of fantasy, is to create fantasy in another's dreams

It’s true I’m not very well off But I feel richer than Boris Karloff Because I’m a poet, because I know you And because I know how much I need Which isn’t much but it’s easy to bluff That you have enough when you have the freedom To know pretty well when enough is enough. —

Among the guests who appeared on Information, Please were Ben Hecht, George S. Kaufman, Basil Rathbone, Dorothy Thompson, Lillian Gish, Alexander Woollcott, H. V. Kaltenborn, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Carl Sandburg, Albert Spalding, Boris Karloff, Marc Connelly, Dorothy Parker, Beatrice Lillie, and Postmaster General James Farley. Prizefighter Gene Tunney surprised the nation with his knowledge of Shakespeare. Moe Berg, Boston Red Sox catcher, had a

Elizabeth stood in a model pose, whip thin, with a face beside which the faces of angels are coarse and unappealing, in clothes of rags needing to be hauled off and burned, yet somehow arranged into punk couture. Her black pageboy haircut peeked from under a cloche that appeared to have survived the Crash of ’29. She wore a torn black leotard under a skirt of gossamer net, and the exact shoes Boris Karloff had worn in Frankenstein. Two large lean hounds, one black, one black and white, sported, lunged, and whirled around her. Dave inhaled sharply, in both love and despair.

Everywhere that we looked, were objects & artifacts reminiscent of a bygone age. of war & destruction, of mankind's determination to rule his neighbour, to prove how mighty he and his people are, yet a romance of days past that I am drawn to like a soul lost and hearing his lovers cries to him

I haven’t said it yet, but it seemed implied, that cinema for me was the American one, current Hollywood productions. “My” period goes roughly from The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (Henry Hathaway, 1935) with Gary Cooper and Mutiny on the Bounty (Frank Lloyd, 1935) with Charles Laughton and Clark Gable, to the death of Jean Harlow (which I relived many years later like the death of Marilyn Monroe, in an era more aware of the neurotic power of every symbol), with lots of comedies in between, the mystery-romances with Myrna Loy and William Powell and the dog Asta, the musicals of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, the crime pictures of Chinese detective Charlie Chan and the horror films of Boris Karloff. I didn’t remember the names of the directors as well as the names of the actors, except for a few like Frank Capra, Gregory La Cava, and Frank Borzage, who represented the poor rather than the millionaires, usually with Spencer Tracy: they were the good-natured directors from the Roosevelt era; I learned this later; back then I consumed everything without distinguishing between them too much. American cinema in that moment consisted of a collection of actors’ faces without equal before or after (at least it seemed that way to me) and the adventures were simple mechanisms to get these faces together (sweethearts, character actors, extras) in different combinations.

HOSTS: Raymond Edward Johnson until May 22, 1945; Paul McGrath beginning Sept. 28, 1945. Also: House Jameson. CAST: Film stars known for the macabre—Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre, etc.—in lead roles, ca. 1941–42. New York radio performers in subsequent leads and in support: Richard Widmark, Larry Haines, Everett Sloane, Lesley Woods, Anne Seymour, Stefan Schnabel, Arnold Moss,

The early days of Inner Sanctum gave a generous mix of classics and original stories. Boris Karloff was a regular, appearing in, among others, the Poe classics The Telltale Heart and The Fall of the House of Usher. Peter Lorre was heard in The Horla, by Maupassant, and George Coulouris, Paul Lukas, and Claude Rains were also starred performers. But Karloff propelled it: fueled by his film portrayals of Frankenstein’s monster, he appeared more than 15 times in 1941–42. While the network was under pressure from parents’ groups to curtail graphic violence, Karloff wanted even more gore. His public expected it, he argued.

He prefers the book to the movie version with Boris Karloff, if only because there’s something so much scarier about a monster who can plot and scheme, a monster who’s smart. Midafternoon,

Mind you, I'm not saying a word against old Kipper. The salt of the earth. But nobody could have called him a knock-out in the way of looks. Having gone in a lot for boxing from his earliest years, he had the cauliflower ear of which I had spoken to Aunt Dahlia and in addition to this a nose which some hidden hand had knocked slightly out of the straight. He would, in short, have been an unsafe entrant to have backed in a beauty contest, even if the only other competitors had been Boris Karloff, King Kong and Oofy Prosser of the Drones.