the Irish ... are full of the fear of the Lord and the joy of living, and they don't know how to combine the two, but they'll sure have a good time trying.

I loved playing the part of the feisty Annie Sullivan in The Miracle Worker

Alcohol is a very patient drug. It will wait for the alcoholic to pick it up one more time.

At awards time, The Exorcist was nominated in 11 categories, everybody but the janitor was up for an Oscar. There was no category for what I did.

My only true harmony lies deep within my soul, wherever that is. I know that somehow I am in tune with the universe.

I believe in joy, but I believe in the flip-side, agony.

I can choose to accelerate my disease to an alcoholic death or incurable insanity, or I can choose to live within my thoroughly human condition.

One of the cruelest judgments sustained against me is that I have spoken out as a recovered alcoholic to stimulate my acting career.

Aside from my son, no person has ever shown for me the gentle concern I knew from Governor Adlai Stevenson.

I have reached a state in life where I can buy a whole house full of chairs and can bump into them until they are black and blue

I'd never been in play long enough for the flowers to die in the dressing room

Keep your heart open for love

In life, be a kid in a candy store.

I hope I know my own unworthiness, and that I hate and despise myself and all my fellow-creatures as every practicable Christian should.

You can not make everybody happy.

The rhema is regarded as a more immediate word from God which we do not find in the 66 books of the Bible.

But all I could think of was taking some books to read in jail. I held everybody up, choosing which ones to take.

Disappointment proves that expectations were mistaken.

Greatness starts with the replacement of hatred with polite disdain.

At the top of the iron staircase leading to the stage, the good, dry, dusty warmth wraps me round like a comfortable dirty cloak.

Guys like Henry and his buddies were an accident waiting to happen; the little kids' version of floods or tornadoes or gallstones.