Roger Lewis > Quotes

“Peter feasts off people-he finds himself so totally boring that he's got to escape from himself and find refuge and security in another personality-that's the only form of communication left open to him.”
― Roger Lewis, The Life and Death of Peter Sellers

“His past, again like Dali’s, had to be mythologised. For, let’s face it, his lower-middle-class upbringing was not exactly Angela’s Ashes,”
― Roger Lewis, Anthony Burgess: A Biography

“make no apology for this being a visionary book, a fierce book, a prose version of a portrait in pinks and lilacs and orange and yellow; a book about more than it seems at first to be about, in which the fame of great stars is to be contrasted with our own unimportance and silliness.”
― Roger Lewis, Erotic Vagrancy: Everything About Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor

“Shakespeare was Burton's way of looking at the world, its shadows and reflections.”
― Roger Lewis, Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor

“What Burton actually was, was a disappointed romantic, and as he registered his own downfall, his life became intolerable to him.”
― Roger Lewis, Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor

“There’s an end-of-empire atmosphere about Burgess; of high Victorian imperialism fading away in a remote outpost.”
― Roger Lewis, Anthony Burgess: A Biography

“But love mystified him, as it mystified Taylor, too. For them it was something obsessive, psychotic, maimed, disturbed, haunted. 'I wish I didn't love people,' Burton said in December 1968. 'And I wish I didn't shout at people.”
― Roger Lewis

“Though now and again desperate and miserable, she rather luxuriated in her own anguish - and I never feel I pity her. There's too much savagery and pride.”
― Roger Lewis, Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor

“Their erotic relationship - their need too be transported by irresistible powers, which disturb and arouse - had an intensity and force, excitement and fervour.”
― Roger Lewis, Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor

“In this book I try to evoke the age of Sixties excess - the freaks and groupies, the private jets and jewels, the steam yachts and sailing in the azure sea; the mess and splendour of material good; the magnificent bad taste and greed and money smelling like jasmine.”
― Roger Lewis, Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor

“The welsh are supreme at being actors and actresses because our flamboyance is suppressed; it is the guilty secret, which bursts out now and again in lunatic ways, quick and fierce.”
― Roger Lewis, Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor

“1966   Spring: goes to America (without Lynne) for conference on literary translation at Long Island University, New York.”
― Roger Lewis, Anthony Burgess: A Biography

“I have a lust for diamonds,' said Taylor, 'that's almost like a disease.”
― Roger Lewis, Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor

“Life is contingent, zig-baggy, made up of discordant moments; and though the history and fortunes of Burton and Taylor seemed to come along or accumulate like a Dickens novel in weekly instalment, even with them living their lives as they pleased, much of existence simply passed by, or was soon forgotten - appetite, scraps, events, sub-plots,, which slowed down, speeded up, sank in, or failed to register.”
― Roger Lewis, Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor

“They have a confrontational style. They weren't refined in their appearance, but coarse. They had resilience, and this is what curbed, or allowed them to survive (or surmount), their recklessness. They didn't much care what others thought of them, of their opinions and judgment. They were capable of courage, and temper. Taylor and Lucy had defiance - and the camera captured this. Nothing about them was relaxing.”
― Roger Lewis, Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor

“Those left at home, the Amises, Murdochs, Drabbles and Byatts, subsisting in an England that has ‘been too cosy, too easy to live in’, have avoided the shocks of the life overseas and hence have had to ‘make literature out of suburban adultery’.”
― Roger Lewis, Anthony Burgess: A Biography

“he was heard to say he'd like to be invisible really, observing and recording, 'to be able to do that in absolute anonymity would be very desirable.”
― Roger Lewis, Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor

“I'd still like to see the Steve Coogan as Peter Sellers version of The Life and Death of Peter Sellers (2004).”
― Roger Lewis, The Life and Death of Peter Sellers

“It is the case, I think, that when they are 'themselves', celebrities become strangers to themselves, silly and self-conscious.”
― Roger Lewis, Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor

“And if biographies are distortions - egregious and artificial - where does that leave biography? Or what I choose to call the biographical fallacy? Apart from there being, obviously, a tombstone at the far end, a summing-up in the papers should you be notable, despite what biographies allege, a life has no predictable shape or stability.”
― Roger Lewis, Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor

“The fragments remaining, though seemingly distracted, conflicting compressed, had, I felt, vitality, movement - the movement of rocks in an avalanche.”
― Roger Lewis, Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor

“Taylor had an affinity with animals, more than with men - Burton delighted, incidentally, during their erotic vagrancies, in watching her 'become the animal that all men seek in their women.”
― Roger Lewis, Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor

“They'd entered his imagination, extending into all areas of his life and existence and to put on a costume and move around on a stage or film studio, surrounded by a cast, a crew, an audience doing things and declaiming for effect, striking attitudes and poses 0 he'd be like an animal in captivity, and all this was compromising, standardising.”
― Roger Lewis, Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor

“I am perhaps less interested in Burton and Taylor historically and biographically, than in isolating them culturally, as carnal and fantasy figures who floated about in a world of child stars, faded grandeur, alcoholism, promiscuity and Lassie. If they remain significant, desirable, it is because what I watch and absorb in the end isn't a performance but a personality, a presence. Taylor is subtle and soft, with her perfumes and firs - yet there is something demonic and lethal about her. Burton, in his turn, with his ravaged, handsome face, looks as if he is lit by silver moonlight, when perhaps he'd turn into a wolf. His films have the atmosphere of intense dreams - dreams filled with guilt and morbidity.”
― Roger Lewis, Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor

“As the unreality of Hollywood only made him aware of his agitation and hollowness, he was drawn back sentimentally to his birth place, or tot he idea of his birthplace, and he drank himself to death when he saw only wasted opportunities: 'I loved my silly image as the besotted Welsh genius, dying in his own vomit in the gutter,' he said unconvincingly.”
― Roger Lewis, Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor

“Do you mind if we go up on stage? I haven't stood on a stage for twenty-odd years." It was a very moving experience for him, and tears filled his eyes.”
― Roger Lewis, Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor

“It was as if he was contemptuous of his talent - his acting is suffused with guilt, with a sense of loss, with the water of life flowing by.”
― Roger Lewis, Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor

“With Taylor, there's more of a fairy-tale element, as if she's a creature who has only borrowed human shape and form - there's something about her that's elemental, from the forrest floor.”
― Roger Lewis, Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor

“It was as if she was about to die, but never did. Burton, meanwhile, when he was alive, would be on pins: 'I worried a lot about Elizabeth this morning... and how awful it would be to lose her. I worked myself up to a rare state of misery.”
― Roger Lewis, Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor

“Michael Sheen once asked Taylor, 'How sweet is the air between the Welsh Valleys and the slopes of Mount Olympus?'; a book about love and hatred and obsessions; men and women and their incongruities; the issues of manhood and narcism; the nature of ravishment and conquest and of suffering and ultimate risk; the fantasises we have about film stars and the fantasies the Burtons had about each other. What did they hope and desire for themselves? Why did they seem incapable of calm or satisfaction?”
― Roger Lewis, Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor