Elizabeth Taylor Quotes

No one in the modern world controls the wealth or territory that Cleopatra did.

Cleopatra was on a political mission to save her country and her power, but what we remember about her are these two famed seductions, which are a matter of politics, not a matter of love.

Cleopatra is one of the roles that I would love to do!

We're talking about, essentially, the Roman historians, who wrote Cleopatra into the story mostly so that they could talk about the rise of Rome. And that is one of the problems, of course, in recounting her life. She's only ever apparent to us when there is a Roman in the room, or when her story intersects with the rise of Rome.

I wouldn't dare to speculate as to Cleopatra's falling in love. Her relationships are too convenient for that.

Here you have an incredibly ambitious, accomplished woman who comes up against some of the same problems that women in power come up against today. Cleopatra plays an oddly pivotal role in world history as well; in her lifetime, Alexandria is the center of the universe, Rome is still a backwater.

I decided I was going to play Cleopatra as someone with a brain. She's kept Egypt, this tiny country, in a balance of power with the almighty Roman empire, and she's done it through force of personality.

Playing Mark Antony in 'Rome' will always be a favourite of mine because he was such an outrageously big and interesting character to play. Also, the fact that we were able, with that character, to find out and present the public with a biography of that man that had not been really seen before.

An epic subject requires a writer of epic skill and scope, and we have a perfect pairing in Cleopatra and Stacy Schiff. Absorbing and illuminating, this new biography will endure.

I'm very well known for hiding my phone in really weird places. I can hide it in a refrigerator during a scene or under that bed. It's pretty bad, but at the end of the day we can all laugh at it.

There are clearly many Egyptian free-thinkers and intellectuals - lots of wonderful Egyptian artists and architects and scientists.

I checked to see if there'd been a really good book published in the last few decades. Then I started with what Cleopatra would have read, asking myself, 'What can we know about her education?' It turns out to be a very great deal, and bizarrely, no one had written about that before.

Egypt, the Egypt of antiquity, at a later time, exercised a mysterious fascination over me. I recognized a picture of it immediately, without hesitation and astonishment, in an illustrated magazine.

I'm terrifically absentminded.

I've always really, really wanted to go to Egypt and go inside some pyramids and just hang out there. I don't know why. I don't like hot weather, and I don't like the desert, but something about the pyramid and the mummies and all their history there, I'd love to go check it out.

Egypt gave birth to what later would become known as 'Western Civilization,' long before the greatness of Greece and Rome.

I'm the classic absent-minded professor: I'm very focused on something, and meanwhile, I've left the refrigerator door open for hours.

Egypt is not a country we live in but a country that lives within us.

Once, I had to clip a jacket back to take a picture, and after they were done I forgot to remove the clip until someone noticed.

The Egyptians had no Stone age, and were born civilized.

Egypt! from whose all dateless tombs arose Forgotten Pharaohs from their long repose, And shook within their pyramids to hear A new Cambyses thundering in their ear ;, While the dark shades of forty ages stood Like startled giants by Nile's famous flood.

Indeed, it is measure of how little we know about Cleopatra that the only images of her are either the coins she struck, bearing very unflattering official portraits of her, or some doubtful busts, which may be of other women imitating her coiffure.

Eventually, when I started studying Egyptology, I realized that seeing with my naked eyes alone wasn't enough. Because all of the sudden, in Egypt, my beach had grown from a tiny beach in Maine to one eight hundred miles long, next to the Nile.

To me, Egypt is a wonderful history, a wonderful people, and it's represented through artists like Om Kalthoum, who is considered the fourth pyramid of Egypt. She's a wonderful diva whose voice, for me, is really Egyptian.

Egypt is a large, complex, very important country.