Love & Passion Quote by Tallulah Bankhead

Bankhead turns neurosis into a punchline, then uses the punchline to tell you exactly who she is. Calling them "phobias" is an actor's exaggeration - melodrama with its eyeliner on - but it also sneaks in a confession: her discomfort isn’t occasional; it’s structural. Sleep, waking, solitude: the three unavoidable beats of a day. She’s not afraid of heights or snakes; she’s afraid of the basic seams where a life goes quiet.

The line works because it flatters and indicts at once. "As slick as a sonnet" is a gorgeous piece of self-mythmaking, suggesting that if she could just switch off these irritations, her life would have the polished inevitability of art. Then she undercuts herself: "but as dull as ditch water". That reversal is the engine. Bankhead isn’t chasing peace; she’s addicted to friction. The supposed cure would erase the very drama that makes her feel real.

The subtext is performance as survival. Hating to go to bed and get up reads like someone in constant negotiation with routine, the enemy of celebrity and appetite. "I hate to be alone" is the dagger, and also the tell: the need for an audience, not just professionally but psychically. In the context of Bankhead’s larger persona - the fast-living, wisecracking Broadway and Hollywood figure who made glamour look like defiance - solitude isn’t restorative; it’s exposure. The joke protects the vulnerability, and the vulnerability gives the joke its bite.