Quotes by Gale Gordon

Actually, I wanted to be a toe dancer. My mother did an act in London. She had two girls who did a little ballet number while she changed gowns between the songs she was performing. And when the ballet slippers wore out, she brought them home to me. I put them on and could walk all over the house on my toes.

For comedy to be good, it has to be played straight. And again, the greatest example of this is Lucy Ball. No matter how wild the shows were that we did, no matter how bizarre the situations were, they were never played as if they were funny. They were played like serious incidents of ordinary everyday life. And that's why they are terribly funny and are still considered classic comedies.

I had admired Richard Burton for years and years before I had ever worked with him. He was a great, great actor. It was a joy to get to know him as a person.

I think anybody who has been in the theater, prefers it. Television is a... factory. You turn out things on a revolving assembly line. You don't have time to perfect anything in television.

I've had high regard for a great many actors. I started out as a serious actor. I didn't start out as a comic actor at all. That just developed because I happened to be louder than anyone else. If they wanted a blowhard character, they called on me. I've had innumerable people that I've respected and venerated.

I've never been bored in my life working. A lot of people get bored after five minutes. They want to go home and pick up their check. That's never been the case for me. I'm always the first to arrive and the last to leave because I truly enjoy what I'm doing. That's why I've been in show business for so long-I love it!

I've worked with very few that I considered unpleasant. Dennis the Menace was a joy to work on.

Lucille didn't care about messing herself up. A lot of stars of her stature wouldn't do physical comedy because they were afraid they'd get their hair messed up or they'd look bad. I remember once she fell into a vat of green dye. She came out with not only her hair green but everything was green!

Lucille would never allow anyone to double for her. If she had to learn how to ice skate, she'd ice skate. If she had to go down a staircase on skis then that's what she'd do. She wouldn't allow a double to do it because the cameras were very close. She thought it would be ridiculous to use a double.

My father was a vaudevillian, and my mother was principal boy in pantomime among other things such as light musical comedy.

My voice, I have to say, is kind of miraculous because I was born with a cleft palate.

My wife and I love to read. We're going to have to move out to make room for the books! And we have our dogs.

Radio wasn't so bad because you didn't have to memorize the lines. But you did have to do everything because your own character was in your voice-that took a little doing. Most people thought that if you could speak English or read then you could be a radio actor. Well, that wasn't so. You had to put a great deal into your reading to convince somebody who was just listening that a certain character is speaking.

The last thing in the world I should have done was go into the theater because was inordinately shy as a young man. I couldn't open my mouth. At a party, I was the one stuck up against the wall. I was embarrassed about talking. I felt that I couldn't talk well.

When I'd tell people that I wanted $150 they almost fainted. They thought I was an upstart and an egomaniacal idiot.