Quotations about Noël Coward taken from 'A Talent To Amuse' by Sheridan Morley

For published quotations by Coward see 'Noël Coward In His Own Words' edited by Barry Day and
'The Sayings of Noël Coward' edited by Philip Hoare.
In addition there are quotations taken from more recent media articles and books.

Noel Coward is simply a phenomenon, and one that is unlikely to occur ever again in theatre history.
Terence Rattigan

He was a lively, brilliant, settled, quarrelsome, vivid boy
Micheal Mac Liammróir

Throughout the 20s he was a tremendous leader, in that we all tried to follow the way he dressed and talked because we knew it was fashionable.
Donald Neville- Willing

All Noël Coward's characters talk like typewriters.
Mrs Patrick Campbell

Consider his dialogue: smooth, hard, swift pebbles of thought thrown disdainfully against the glass windows of the houses in which we have ensconced ourselves.
Beverley Nichols

Noel's life is almost passed in a prolonged procession through applauding parties.
Hesketh Pearson

Even the youngest of us will know in fifty years' time exactly what we mean by 'a very Noel Coward sort of person'.
Kenneth Tynan

His comic creations do live as people, and their lives go on behind and under and around what they are saying; the text provides only the faintest guide lines to what is really going on between the people on the stage.
John Russell Taylor

There is neither health nor cleanness about any of Mr Coward's characters.
James Agate

(He is) his own invention and contribution to the twentieth century.
John Osborne

There are probably greater painters than Noël, greater novelists than Noël, greater librettists, greater composers of music, greater singers, greater dancers, greater comedians, greater tragedians, greater stage producers, greater film directors, greater cabaret artists, greater TV stars. If there are, they are fourteen different people. Only one man combined all fourteen different labels - The Master.
Lord Louis Mountbatten

Noël Coward as an industry is still in its infancy.
Alexander Woollcott

Nod was probably the first man who took hold of me and made me think ... he gave me a sense of balance, of right and wrong.
Laurence Olivier

I doubt that Mr Coward has ever spent one hour in the study of ethics.
T. S. Eliot

His laurels seem to bear inscriptions like 'Duty', 'Perseverance' and 'Believe In Your Star'.
Laurette Taylor

One knows everything of what Mr Coward does but nothing of what he is.
Ivor Brown

If we wish to understand some of the youth who grew to manhood in the Great War, we must take a good look at Mr Coward in whom the gaiety and the despair of his generation are exactly mingled.
St John Ervine

He has the look of a dead albatross.
Robert Benchley

On no one has success sat more lightly; he has warmed himself in it, and he has mellowed.
Marie Tempest

Who doesn't love his youth? For that is what Coward is to men of my age: 'Private Lives' 'Conversation Piece', 'Operette', 'Tonight at 8.30', 'The Scoundrel' and all those songs we sang to our girls driving back in the red MG from the Thames pub on a summer night in 1936. 
John Whiting

He is a nice, nice man.
Harold Nicolson

Mr Coward writes dialogue as well as any man going.
Edward Albee

Demonstrably the greatest living English playwright.
Ronald Bryden

Following his 'flop' The Two Of Us Michael Frayn said: Richard Briers gave me Sheridan Morley's biography of Noel Coward as a first night present. I had always assumed that Noel Coward had a career of unbroken success and I was amazed to read this book and discover that he'd had many flops. And the thing about flops in the theatre is that not many people see them and they tend to be forgotten, whereas successes go on and on and people do tend to see them so, on the whole, everybody remembers the successes and not the flops. Michael Frayn