I read Shakespeare and the Bible, and I can shoot dice. That's what I call a liberal education.

The joke turns on an unexpected definition of “liberal education.” Instead of formal schooling or respectable refinement, Bankhead proposes a hybrid literacy: the ability to move between the highest cultural authorities (Shakespeare and Scripture) and the practical competencies of nightlife and risk (dice). The line satirizes social pretensions—suggesting that real sophistication includes knowing both the canon and the world—and it also asserts autonomy: she claims the right to define education on her own terms. The quote’s enduring appeal lies in its compact critique of class-coded ideas of cultivation, delivered with self-aware bravado.