- One of the luckiest things that ever happened to me was to be born with a desperate desire to become an actor. I never remember at any age wanting to be anything else.
- [referring to his Oscar-winning role as a brain-damaged mute in Ryan's Daughter (1970)] It was weird. I just thought I'd been wasting my time for the past 55 years learning all these millions of lines, and then getting an Oscar for not speaking.
- Ryan's Daughter (1970) is not my best film, but it is the best thing that happened to me, professionally. It brought me the Academy Award, and that meant I could finally be known again as somebody other than Hayley Mills' father.
- [in a personal tribute to Noël Coward] I don't know any actor alive today who could get laughs with, apparently, so little effort. You never compromised or went out after our sympathy for one moment.
- [on Trevor Howard] He became one of the finest actors we ever had. One of the greatest, and a lovely man with it.
- I used to write childish melodramas when I was seven or eight and act them out in the schoolhouse.
- [on his first wife Aileen Raymond] We were both young, and I guess we just drifted apart.
- [after receiving a Best Supporting Actor Oscar® for his role as Michael, a brain-damaged mute man in Ryan's Daughter (1970)] I was speechless for a year in Ireland, and I'm utterly speechless at this moment.
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