Vincent Price

“Right at this moment, I only want silence. I believe that the end of life is silence in the love people have for you. I've actually been running through what people have said about the end. Religion says that the end is one thing, because it serves their purpose. But great thinkers alike haven't always agreed. Shakespeare knew how to say it better than anyone else. Hamlet says 'The rest is silence.' And when you think of the noises of everyday life, you realize how particularly desirable that is. Silence.”

“Many Hollywoodians may have good taste and an interest in culture but they certainly hide it. They're afraid they'll be branded as sissies if someone finds out they write poetry or own a painting. They're so timid about culture.”

“Art is excitement which if we can't create ourselves, we can at least, through love of it, make available to others.”

“I was never educated to be an actor. I went to a regular college. It was a great thing for me because I feel that the main thing to get out of college is a thirst for knowledge. College should teach you how to be curious. Most people think that college is the end of education, but it isn't. The ceremony of giving you the diploma is called commencement. And that means you are fit to commence learning because you have learned how to learn.”

“Right now I am thinking of writing another cookbook. All cookbooks have a gimmick, and mine will be that it contains recipes that I have invented and named after famous people. Some of them are:Brisket of Brynner (very lean meat)Carson Casserole (it's got everything on it)Barbecued WaltersMarinated MaudeRoasted RhodaKing King Curry (it will feed about eight thousand people)Fricassee of FonziPickled RicklesRaquel RelishLeftovers à la Gabors”

“I have come more and more to the belief that we owe our arts a thousand times what we are paying them. We support our cigarette factories, soap manufacturers, beauticians, all the luxury and pleasure businesses of our over-indulged civilization, but we pay our painters an average wage... and yet when the future digs us from the past they won't care how we smell, what we smoke, or if we bathed. All they’ll know of us will be our architecture, our paintings, sculpture, poems, laws, philosophy, drama, our pottery and fabrics, the things which our hands made and our minds thought up - oh, the machines they’ll dig up too, but perhaps they’ll point to them as our destruction, the wheels that drove us down to death.”

“I know what I like—I like art—and I like what I know.”

“We may all be a peculiar lot...often broke, often dissatisfied because we're not doing more and better work...but we know how to have a ball that makes the rest of the world seem square.”

“The jet is a great invention. Besides being a world shrinker, par excellence, it has much of the quality and charm of a roller coaster. And it's big. Once, years ago, on a ten-stop, cross-country air trip, I turned to the man next to me and said, quite genuinely: "What keeps these big goddam things up in the air?”

“What do you do when you find yourself out in a lie—even a white one? Well, one thing for sure, you don't put on black, you don't mourn and beat out a staccato mea culpa on your breast. You go! Get the hell out! Take a chance! Forget you're an American, living in the suburbs of success, hoping to move into the big city...You go!”

“Do you ever rub your eyes and suddenly find you're awake and not asleep, as you'd grown to suspect you were?”

“Well, what do you owe yourself? Do you dare take time out to listen to the grass grow, or can you even afford the expense of getting far enough away from life's daily cacophony to hear it grow if you took the time?”

“In art, religion, and politics the respect must be mutual, no matter how violent the disagreement.”

“If I could prescribe a single rule for looking at a work of art it would be to enjoy it. If we're honest with ourselves, we have to admit we enjoy our tears just as much as we enjoy our laughter. The only moments of life that are a bore are when we don't care one way or another.”

“I'm extremely profane, unconsciously so, when I see something great for the first time; I don't know why, but beauty and profanity are related to me in the same way. It may be that I want to think of art in the vernacular, but I have no control over what comes out of my mouth when my eyes take in great beauty...it might just be the reason I avoid going to museums with elderly ladies.”

“I trust people who are violent about art, as long as they aren't closed-minded. But, unfortunately, most art blowhards are also art bigots.”

“Art is love-times-love; the creator loves it and his audience adores it. To miss the sensation of loving art is to miss a kind of parenthood—false pregnancy perhaps—but as Van Gogh said, "If, defrauded of the power to create physically, a man tries to create thoughts in place of children, he is still part of humanity"...a big part.”

“There comes a time in life when you know what you like and have to make up your mind to like what you know, or at least have begun to know. In other words, you must determine in what direction your knowledge is leading, thus far.”

“One thing is certain: the arts keep you alive. They stimulate, encourage, challenge, and, most of all, guarantee a future free from boredom. They allow growth and even demand it in that time of life we call maturity but too often enter it with a childish faith that what we learned in youth is sustenance enough for the years when most men are mentally famished but won't admit it—or when they are apt to curb their hunger with the sops of complacency, security, and the assurance of death.”

“The story ends with a crack the actor Hans Conreid made on seeing my two hundred black and white pots. Said Hans, "You're one actor no one will ever be able to say he hasn't got a pot to..." End quote.”

“Sometimes you read a passage by a great writer, and you know what he says and how he says it will always be, for you, the only possible way it could be. Less often a painter will describe an event in a way that fits into your interpretation of that event so perfectly that it becomes the event itself.”

“Nevertheless, Los Angeles is my "Home, Sweet Home." I chose it, and, as goes the cliché, I've made my bed—but I'll be damned if I'll lie in it or, worse, culturally die in it!”

“San Diego has the finest zoo in America, but the Los Angeles Zoo is not much more than a home for retired Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lions.”

“Mother had told me her favorite story about a little Protestant lady who, on being told that the candle at the high altar in St. Peter's had not been out for a thousand years, pursed her lips and extinguished it, saying, "Well, it's out now.”

“I blew my nose, blotted my eyes, buried as much of my face as I could in my handkerchief, and blurted out a feeble: "Sorry...something in my eye." The voice said: "Yes...beauty.”

“There's something fascinating about seeing something you don't like at first but directly know you will love—in time. People are that way, all through life. You come against a personality, and it questions yours. You shy away but know there are gratifying secrets there, and the half-open door is often more exciting than the wide.”

“After all, a love of art is a fine thing for a young boy, but art is long—and life can be pretty damned long too, without our just desserts!”

“The follower of fashion can be as honest as the leader of the rebellion against it.”

“In order to get out of the dumps, there are many steps to walk up, and most of the ones I know of, not only for myself but others, are made of money.”

“I do, however, get along fine with apes and I have worked sack of potatoes in front of the camera. Trainers tell me they like my voice and that because I treat them as people they like me. Well, it’s easy to do, since some of them are people and easier to work with than some—people, I mean actors.”

“I’m always intrigued by my nonsensical concern with picking out a bunch of things that look exactly alike the ones that somehow I feel are the best and belong to me. It’s that same crazy urge or superstition, or whatever it is, that makes me open a Bible in a hotel room, hoping for some great happenstance spiritual word of advice. More often than not, I hit a long passage of begats and begots, which contain little inspiration other than the fact that procreation is the highest aim of life.”

“It's as much fun to scare as to be scared.”

“What's important about an actor is his acting, not his life.”

“A man who limits his interests limits his life.”