Never let anyone know what you’re thinking.
While many neverisms have come from memorable stage and screen performances, others have come from actors dispensing key acting advice or passing along important lessons they’ve learned in their careers:
Never confuse the size of your paycheck with the size of your talent.MARLON BRANDO
Never take top billing. You’ll last longer that way.BING CROSBY
Never get caught acting.LILLIAN GISH
Never treat your audience as customers.
Always treat them as partners.JAMES STEWART
In the remainder of the chapter, we’ll continue our look at neverisms from the world of stage and screen. You’ll see more quotations from actors and actresses reflecting on their craft and their careers. You’ll find many more quotations from Hollywood films, and occasionally some from the small screen known as television. The cinematic world has produced many truly memorable lines, and some of the best have been neveristically phrased. When recalling great lines from actors, though, it is helpful to remember that those lines were actually written by someone else. So, in the pages to follow, I will try to identify the screenwriters as well as the actors who spoke their lines.
Never turn your back on an actor;
remember, it was an actor who shot Lincoln.ANONYMOUS
Never confuse the improbable with the impossible: “Burke’s Law.”GENE BARRY, as Captain Amos Burke, in a
1963 episode of the TV series Burke’s Law
In this popular 1960s television series, Gene Barry played a dapper Los Angeles millionaire who had been named chief of detectives for the L.A. Police Department. As he fought crime from his chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud, Burke was famous for dispensing proverbial sayings to his young detectives, always ending them in his trademark manner: “Burke’s Law.” The series also included these neverisms:
Never walk away from a long shot.
Never call your captain unless it’s murder.
Never drink martinis with beautiful suspects.
Never give your girl and dog the same kind of jewelry.
Never resist an impulse, Sabrina. Especially if it’s terrible.HUMPHREY BOGART, to Audrey Hepburn,
in the 1954 Billy Wilder classic Sabrina
(screenplay by Wilder & Samuel A. Taylor)
This is the reply that business executive Linus Larrabee (Bogart) makes to the beautiful Sabrina Fairchild (Hepburn), after she waltzes into his office and announces, “All night long I’ve had the most terrible impulse to do something.”
Never settle back on your heels. Never relax.
If you relax, the audience relaxes.JAMES CAGNEY, advice to actors
Never let yourself get between you and your character.MICHAEL CAINE, in What’s It All About? (1992)
In this memoir, Caine said he became an actor in part because of advice he got from his father: “Never do a job where you can be replaced by a machine.”
Never meddle with play-actors, for they’re a favored race.MIGUEL DE CERVANTES, from Don Quixote (1605)
We tend to think that the worship of actors—and the somewhat exalted status they hold in society—is a modern phenomenon, but this suggests it is a longstanding tradition.
Never look as if you are lost.
Always look as if you know exactly where you are going.JOAN COLLINS
Collins added, “If you don’t know where you are going, head straight for the bar.”
Rule number one: never carry a gun.
If you carry a gun you may be tempted to use it.
Rule number two: never trust a naked woman.SEAN CONNERY, in the 1999 film Entrapment
(screenplay by Ron Bass & William Broyles)
In the film, Connery plays the role of Robert “Mac” MacDougal, an aging international art thief. In this scene, he explains “The Rules” to his unlikely partner, a sexy insurance investigator (Catherine Zeta-Jones) who needs his help in the investigation of an art heist.
Never stop fighting till the fight is done.KEVIN COSTNER, as G-man Eliot Ness,
in the 1987 film The Untouchables
(screenplay by David Mamet)
This was a tagline for the movie. It came at the very end of the film, just after Capone has been convicted. Ness, surrounded by reporters, says, “Never stop, never stop fighting till the fight is done.” Capone, who can barely hear Ness amidst the pandemonium, says, “What’d he say? Whadda you saying?” After Ness replies, “I said never stop fighting till the fight is done,” he adds, “It’s over.”
Never let it be said that your anal-retentive
attention to detail never yielded positive results.MATT DAMON, to Ben Affleck, in the 1999 film Dogma
(screenplay by Kevin Smith)
This line is one of the highlights of a quirky black comedy in which Damon (as Loki) and Affleck (as Bartleby) play two renegade angels who, because of Bartleby’s attention to detail, discover a loophole that may get them readmitted to heaven.
Remember, you are a star.
Never go across the alley, even to dump garbage,
unless you are dressed to the teeth.CECIL B. DEMILLE, his stock advice to film stars
Never judge a book by its movie.J. W. EAGAN
This alteration of Never judge a book by its cover has been around for decades, but I’ve never been able to learn anything about the mysterious Mr. Eagan. The quotation describes a popular view: movies rarely do justice to the books on which they are based.
Never lose your openness,
your childish enthusiasm throughout the journey that is life,
and things will come your way.FEDERICO FELLINI, advice to actors
Never work with animals or children.W. C. FIELDS
This became a signature line for Fields, even though he was not the author (it was a show-business maxim he learned early in his career). The saying has been repeated countless times, and even spawned a great insult. In 1985, Gabriel Byrne appeared in his first starring role in Defense of the Realm, a fast-paced political thriller costarring Greta Scacchi and the English actor Denholm Elliott. Byrne, who found Elliott to be extremely difficult to work with, quipped in a post-film interview: “I amended the actor’s cliché to: ‘Never work with children, animals, or Denholm Elliott.’”
Take your work seriously, but never yourself.MARGOT FONTEYN, advice to stage performers
Never tell me the odds.HARRISON FORD, in The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
(screenplay by Leigh Bracket & Lawrence Kasdan)