Burton Taylor Quotes

another of their acquaintances finds himself mesmerised by the way that he 'always had something of ... rivetting stupidity to say on any subject'.

Since I was a little girl, I believed I was a child of destiny, and if that is true, Richard Burton was surely my fate.

Thank you,” he said as he gathered his bags and looked at me. “I love you more than anyone has ever loved anyone in the history of the world. Do you know that? Do you know that Antony didn’t love Cleopatra as much as I love you? Do you know that Romeo didn’t love Juliet as much as I love you?” I laughed. “I love you, too,” I said. “More than Liz Taylor loved Richard Burton.

I love not being me, not being Elizabeth Taylor, but being Richard Burton's wife.

once described a second marriage as the "triumph of hope over experience." But given Taylor and Burton's track record their union represented something grander: the triumph of hope over a mountain of empirical evidence.

John and Yoko referred to themselves in the third person as Liz and Dick—Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton—whenever I went out with them.

Burton Malkiel, professor of economics, Princeton University and author of A Random Walk Down Wall Street: "Through the past thirty years more than two-thirds of professional portfolio managers have been outperformed by the unmanaged S&P 500 Index.

make no apology for this being a visionary book, a fierce book, a prose version of a portrait in pinks and lilacs and orange and yellow; a book about more than it seems at first to be about, in which the fame of great stars is to be contrasted with our own unimportance and silliness.

There was, he said, something pervasive going on that was changing the tone and character of the national discourse. An obsession with celebrity, epitomized by paparazzi chasing down stars such as Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, was becoming ubiquitous. Magazines and newspapers that “purport to be responsible organs” were making “these pompous and condescending decisions about lives, about facts and situations.” Where did that lead? As Marlon explained later, “I was concerned that the freedoms enshrined by the First Amendment were being misused to create a press that faced no consequences for diminishing the intelligence of the nation.

When you get aroused playing Scrabble, that's love, baby.

told of Henry’s reputed sexual endowments, Burton

Taylor had an affinity with animals, more than with men - Burton delighted, incidentally, during their erotic vagrancies, in watching her 'become the animal that all men seek in their women.

It is the case, I think, that when they are 'themselves', celebrities become strangers to themselves, silly and self-conscious.

We note this slips, those eyes, plus her white hats made from orchid stamens. She's like something from a botanical garden. Uncredited in the title sequence, Taylor, by 1979, was so famous, she didn't require any announcement - she briefly materialises and dematerialises, like a night bloom.

Taylor went to her mother ' and the tears rolled down both our cheeks... I couldn't stop crying. I knew I would cry for days but that didn't matter,' because she enjoyed it really, never felt better in her life. Taylor enjoyed disaster, illness, drunkeness, drugs, violence, lechery, insults and acrimony.

They have a confrontational style. They weren't refined in their appearance, but coarse. They had resilience, and this is what curbed, or allowed them to survive (or surmount), their recklessness. They didn't much care what others thought of them, of their opinions and judgment. They were capable of courage, and temper. Taylor and Lucy had defiance - and the camera captured this. Nothing about them was relaxing.

When he laughed (...) it is a derisive, scornful, cruel sort of snickering. His laughter is lashing out. He cannot trifle. On the receiving end of a joke or if somebody is being obviously funny, he looks startled, bemused. He steps aside, as it were. Disengages himself. I, myself, in the past, have always written about, dwelt on, comic genius - but Burton had a tragic sense of things. His element was despair, almost despondency.

The welsh are supreme at being actors and actresses because our flamboyance is suppressed; it is the guilty secret, which bursts out now and again in lunatic ways, quick and fierce.

She was never so prostrate she couldn't apply lip gloss in the ambulance.

Roberts was always tormented bu a puritan conscience, which made her ill at ease in Hollywood, mistrustful of success and happiness; the puritan conscience that dictated 'everything I did was wrong.' As she wrote in her own diary, 'Yes I have a sweetness and a warmth and intelligence and talent, but I have also a devastating psychological flaw that is finally crippling me.

She was meant to be a goddess, after all, and goddesses can't die - Taylor was affronted bu the idea of genuine death, consigning such an event to her film roles.

Though now and again desperate and miserable, she rather luxuriated in her own anguish - and I never feel I pity her. There's too much savagery and pride.

With Taylor, there's more of a fairy-tale element, as if she's a creature who has only borrowed human shape and form - there's something about her that's elemental, from the forrest floor.

It was as if she was about to die, but never did. Burton, meanwhile, when he was alive, would be on pins: 'I worried a lot about Elizabeth this morning... and how awful it would be to lose her. I worked myself up to a rare state of misery.

Burton was like a broken down king without a kingdom, fumbling with a chalice, adrift in hotel suites, private yachts, executive jets - and in the end I think I agree with him. He never did Lear - so what? He was Lear.

They'd entered his imagination, extending into all areas of his life and existence and to put on a costume and move around on a stage or film studio, surrounded by a cast, a crew, an audience doing things and declaiming for effect, striking attitudes and poses 0 he'd be like an animal in captivity, and all this was compromising, standardising.

Shakespeare was Burton's way of looking at the world, its shadows and reflections.

But love mystified him, as it mystified Taylor, too. For them it was something obsessive, psychotic, maimed, disturbed, haunted. 'I wish I didn't love people,' Burton said in December 1968. 'And I wish I didn't shout at people.

It was Taylor who showed him another way, her Pop Art gaudiness and smeared pigment contrasting with his Pre-Raphaelite fancy methods where, as it were, one weighed one's words.

Do you mind if we go up on stage? I haven't stood on a stage for twenty-odd years." It was a very moving experience for him, and tears filled his eyes.

he was heard to say he'd like to be invisible really, observing and recording, 'to be able to do that in absolute anonymity would be very desirable.

Life is contingent, zig-baggy, made up of discordant moments; and though the history and fortunes of Burton and Taylor seemed to come along or accumulate like a Dickens novel in weekly instalment, even with them living their lives as they pleased, much of existence simply passed by, or was soon forgotten - appetite, scraps, events, sub-plots,, which slowed down, speeded up, sank in, or failed to register.

Conventional or traditional biographies are about corpses, reclining figures on tombs.

Taylor said as much, to Warhol's Interview Magazine in November 1976: 'Private? What make you think my life is private?' Public opinion was the pond in which they swam.

And if biographies are distortions - egregious and artificial - where does that leave biography? Or what I choose to call the biographical fallacy? Apart from there being, obviously, a tombstone at the far end, a summing-up in the papers should you be notable, despite what biographies allege, a life has no predictable shape or stability.

Like Cleopatra, Taylor was her own singular and flamboyant creation, whose own needs were paramount.

In this book I try to evoke the age of Sixties excess - the freaks and groupies, the private jets and jewels, the steam yachts and sailing in the azure sea; the mess and splendour of material good; the magnificent bad taste and greed and money smelling like jasmine.

It was as if he was contemptuous of his talent - his acting is suffused with guilt, with a sense of loss, with the water of life flowing by.

The fragments remaining, though seemingly distracted, conflicting compressed, had, I felt, vitality, movement - the movement of rocks in an avalanche.

I am perhaps less interested in Burton and Taylor historically and biographically, than in isolating them culturally, as carnal and fantasy figures who floated about in a world of child stars, faded grandeur, alcoholism, promiscuity and Lassie. If they remain significant, desirable, it is because what I watch and absorb in the end isn't a performance but a personality, a presence. Taylor is subtle and soft, with her perfumes and firs - yet there is something demonic and lethal about her. Burton, in his turn, with his ravaged, handsome face, looks as if he is lit by silver moonlight, when perhaps he'd turn into a wolf. His films have the atmosphere of intense dreams - dreams filled with guilt and morbidity.

Michael Sheen once asked Taylor, 'How sweet is the air between the Welsh Valleys and the slopes of Mount Olympus?'; a book about love and hatred and obsessions; men and women and their incongruities; the issues of manhood and narcism; the nature of ravishment and conquest and of suffering and ultimate risk; the fantasises we have about film stars and the fantasies the Burtons had about each other. What did they hope and desire for themselves? Why did they seem incapable of calm or satisfaction?

I have a lust for diamonds,' said Taylor, 'that's almost like a disease.

Their erotic relationship - their need too be transported by irresistible powers, which disturb and arouse - had an intensity and force, excitement and fervour.

Burton's hedonism coexisted with his puritanism, and his improprieties were also penitential - he was always working through his guilt, taking pleasure in it. Words when he spoke them had a lyric potency and plangency, the sounds of coiling and lingering, like a stream amongst pebbles.

What Burton actually was, was a disappointed romantic, and as he registered his own downfall, his life became intolerable to him.

The burtons were under a net, shackled by desire; absorbed by each other, yes, by the fantasy and potency and anticipation of each other - but there was also a social and moral trespass, Holy dread, as Taylor knew well enough when she wrote in her memoirs, of her initial meeting with Burton, and its aftermath, 'I think it was a little like damnation to everybody.

As the unreality of Hollywood only made him aware of his agitation and hollowness, he was drawn back sentimentally to his birth place, or tot he idea of his birthplace, and he drank himself to death when he saw only wasted opportunities: 'I loved my silly image as the besotted Welsh genius, dying in his own vomit in the gutter,' he said unconvincingly.