Kindle Notes & Highlights
Writing an autobiography has been likened to marrying a nymphomaniac. Wonderful for the first couple of months; thereafter, exhausting.
The effect of his death on me was profound. I lost the ability to speak and remained more or less silent for just over three months. It was possible for me to make a noise with my vocal chords but it was uncontrollable and unintelligible and it frightened me to hear myself. During my tenth birthday party I made a great effort to use my tongue and lips to produce a little speech of thanks but it was as if they were paralysed and I ran upstairs in tears. Schoolwork was difficult and unkind boys made fun of me. When I began to talk again, it was with a stutter that affected all words beginning
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IT’S BEEN SAID that each of us makes his own weather, determining the colour of the skies in the emotional universe which he inhabits. If that’s so, my sun shines in perpetually clear blue heavens. I am constitutionally and fundamentally incapable of worry. To me, worrying is like trying to grasp a piece of raw liver in a bath of engine oil. Horrible and almost impossible.
It’s ironic that, in an industry where writers and directors but particularly performers search for ways to protect themselves emotionally so as not to be crippled artistically by rejection, I spent so much of my adulthood trying to get in touch with my emotions, to welcome and be led by them. During the previous eight years of my adjustment to the fact of being loved, warts and all, by the most important person in my life, the dichotomy in my nature had been dwindling until at last there was no longer any breach between thought and feeling.
