55 Quotes by Vincent Price

What’s important about an actor is his acting, not his life.

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!

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?

The main thing in life is survival. And survival is not just staying alive. It is also a constant effort to grow and to learn and to work.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!