Erotic Vagrancy Quotes

“The burtons were under a net, shackled by desire; absorbed by each other, yes, by the fantasy and potency and anticipation of each other - but there was also a social and moral trespass, Holy dread, as Taylor knew well enough when she wrote in her memoirs, of her initial meeting with Burton, and its aftermath, 'I think it was a little like damnation to everybody.”
― 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

“Burton's hedonism coexisted with his puritanism, and his improprieties were also penitential - he was always working through his guilt, taking pleasure in it. Words when he spoke them had a lyric potency and plangency, the sounds of coiling and lingering, like a stream amongst pebbles.”
― 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

“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

“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

“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

“Like Cleopatra, Taylor was her own singular and flamboyant creation, whose own needs were paramount.”
― 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

“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

“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

“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

“Conventional or traditional biographies are about corpses, reclining figures on tombs.”
― 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

“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

“Taylor said as much, to Warhol's Interview Magazine in November 1976: 'Private? What make you think my life is private?' Public opinion was the pond in which they swam.”
― Roger Lewis, Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor

“When he laughed (...) it is a derisive, scornful, cruel sort of snickering. His laughter is lashing out. He cannot trifle. On the receiving end of a joke or if somebody is being obviously funny, he looks startled, bemused. He steps aside, as it were. Disengages himself. I, myself, in the past, have always written about, dwelt on, comic genius - but Burton had a tragic sense of things. His element was despair, almost despondency.”
― 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

“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

“We note this slips, those eyes, plus her white hats made from orchid stamens. She's like something from a botanical garden. Uncredited in the title sequence, Taylor, by 1979, was so famous, she didn't require any announcement - she briefly materialises and dematerialises, like a night bloom.”
― Roger Lewis, Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor

“Taylor went to her mother ' and the tears rolled down both our cheeks... I couldn't stop crying. I knew I would cry for days but that didn't matter,' because she enjoyed it really, never felt better in her life. Taylor enjoyed disaster, illness, drunkeness, drugs, violence, lechery, insults and acrimony.”
― 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

“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

“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

“She was meant to be a goddess, after all, and goddesses can't die - Taylor was affronted bu the idea of genuine death, consigning such an event to her film roles.”
― Roger Lewis, Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor

“She was never so prostrate she couldn't apply lip gloss in the ambulance.”
― 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

“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

“Roberts was always tormented bu a puritan conscience, which made her ill at ease in Hollywood, mistrustful of success and happiness; the puritan conscience that dictated 'everything I did was wrong.' As she wrote in her own diary, 'Yes I have a sweetness and a warmth and intelligence and talent, but I have also a devastating psychological flaw that is finally crippling me.”
― Roger Lewis, Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor

“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