Explore Quotes by Noel Coward

I also avoid green vegetables. They're grossly overrated.

Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the mid-day sun.

Trust your instincts. If you have no instincts, trust your impulses.

My life really has been one long extravaganza.

Wit is like caviar - it should be served in small portions and not spread about like marmalade.

It is my considered opinion that the human race (soi disant) is cruel, idiotic, sentimental, predatory, ungrateful, ugly, conceited and egocentric to the last ditch and that the occasional discovery of an isolated exception is as deliciously surprising as finding a sudden brazil nut in what you know to be five pounds of vanilla creams. These glorious moments, although not making life actually worth living, perhaps, at least make it pleasanter.

Conceit is an outward manifestation of inferiority.

Mona Lisa looks as if she has just been sick, or is about to be.

Criticism and Bolshevism have one thing in common. They both seek to pull down that which they could never build.

The theatre should be treated with respect. The theatre is a wonderful place, a house of strange enchantment, a temple of illusion. What it most emphatically is not and never will be is a scruffy, ill-lit, fumed-oak drill hall serving as a temporary soap box for political propaganda.

Never trust a man with short legs. His brains are too near his bottom.

Star quality: I don't know what it is, but I've got it.

I can't sing, but I know how to, which is quite different.

I'm an enormously talented man, and there's no use pretending that I'm not.

I will accept anything in the theatre . . . provided it amuses or moves me. But if it does neither, I want to go home.

Familiarity breeds contempt, but without a little familiarity it's impossible to breed anything.

The air is like a draught of wine. _x000D__x000D_The undertaker cleans his sign, _x000D__x000D_The Hull express goes off the line, _x000D__x000D_When it's raspberry time in Runcorn.

Goodnight, my darlings, I'll see you tomorrow.

I have always been very fond of them (drama critics) . . . I think it is so frightfully clever of them to go night after night to the theatre and know so little about it.

You ask my advice about acting? Speak clearly, don't bump into the furniture and if you must have motivation, think of your pay packet on Friday.

Many years ago I remember a famous actress explaining to me with perfect seriousness that before making an entrance she always stood aside to allow God to go on first. I can also remember that on that particular occasion He gave a singularly uninspired performance.