Paul Newman Quotes

#1. It wasn't as though I really made a commitment to it; there wasn't anything else around. So I wasn't driven to become an actor.. it just seemed to be the thing that I managed to do best.

Paul Newman

#2. People like to do what they used to do after they've stopped being able to do it.

Paul Newman

#3. We are such spendthrifts with our lives, the trick of living is to slip on and off the planet with the least fuss you can muster. I'm not running for sainthood. I just happen to think that in life we need to be a little like the farmer, who puts back into the soil what he takes out.

Paul Newman

#4. Sweet Bird of Youth": "The big difference between people is not between the rich and the poor, the good and the evil. The biggest of all differences between people is between those who have had pleasure in love and those who haven't.

Paul Newman

#5. If you have no enemies, you have no character.

Paul Newman

#6. I really just can't watch myself. I see all the machinery at work and it just drives me nuts.

Paul Newman

#7. I don't think there's anything exceptional or noble in being philanthropic. It's the other attitude that confuses me.

Paul Newman

#8. There are two Newman's laws. The first one is "It is useless to put on your brakes when you're upside down." The second is "Just when things look darkest, they go black.

Paul Newman

#9. The Alexander Technique helped a long-standing back problem and to get a good night's sleep after many years of tossing and turning.

Paul Newman

#10. Acting is a question of absorbing other people's personalities and adding some of your own experience.

Paul Newman

#11. It's all been a bad joke that just ran out of control. I got into food for fun but the business got a mind of its own. Now - my good Lord - look where it has gotten me. My products are on supermarket shelves, in cinemas, in the theater. And they say show business is odd.

Paul Newman

#12. You discover a lot of things on your feet and if you don't have any rehearsal, then anything that happens on the screen is by accident.

Paul Newman

#13. If you don't have enemies, you don't have character.

Paul Newman

#14. Our marriage works because we each carry clubs of equal weight and size.

Paul Newman

#15. So you wound up with Apollo. If he's sometimes hard to swallow. Use this.

Paul Newman

#16. I have vision and the rest of the world wears bifocals.

Paul Newman

#17. I started my career giving a clinic in bad acting in the film, "The Silver Chalice," and now I'm playing a crusty old man who's an animated automobile [in "Cars"]. That's a creative arc for you, isn't it?

Paul Newman

#18. In racing, the fastest person wins. It is very simple.

Paul Newman

#19. You can't really appreciate anonymity until you've lost it. People say that's sour grapes, but it really isn't To be able to walk down the street without people paying attention to you is a real blessing and you lose it when you become an actor.

Paul Newman

#20. Money won is twice as sweet as money earned.

Paul Newman

#21. Admit it. I'm the best you ever seen, Fats. I'm the best there is. And even if you beat me, I'm still the best.

Paul Newman

#22. A lot of people have dreams and never do anything about them. When you have ideas and dreams, you do something about it.

Paul Newman

#23. You can't be as old as I am without waking up with a surprised look on your face every morning: 'Holy Christ, whaddya know - I'm still around!' It's absolutely amazing that I survived all the booze and smoking and the cars and the career.

Paul Newman

#24. There are a lot of drivers who can carry a car. It doesn't happen very often very successfully. I think it takes a certain amount of sensible bravery. It's no good to be brave and just keep crashing.

Paul Newman

#25. I will continue to get behind the wheel of a racing car as long as I am able. But that could all end tomorrow.

Paul Newman

#26. I don't like to discuss my marriage, but I will tell you something which may sound corny but which happens to be true. I have steak at home. Why should I go out for hamburger?

Paul Newman

#27. I wanted, I think, to acknowledge Luck: the chance of it, the benevolence of it in my life, and the brutality of it in the lives of others; made especially savage for children because they may not be allowed the good fortune of a lifetime to correct it.

Paul Newman

#28. Acting is like letting your pants down; you're exposed.

Paul Newman

#29. In the early days of films, the movie star in this country replaced royalty. They've been demoted since then but they're still treated as beings larger than life.

Paul Newman

#30. I respect generosity in people, and I respect it in companies too, I don't look at it as philanthropy; I see it as an investment in the community.

Paul Newman

#31. There really is no such thing as a sick child; there are children who happen to be sick. Think about it, and you will understand the magic of the Camps

Paul Newman

#32. There are many ingredients that go into making a film. It baffles me, what works and what doesn't.

Paul Newman

#33. Every time I get a script it's a matter of trying to know what I could do with it. I see colors, imagery. It has to have a smell. It's like falling in love. You can't give a reason why.

Paul Newman

#34. I just hope when my body goes, or when my mind does, I have the guts to end it the way Hemingway did. I don't want anybody wiping drool off my chin.

Paul Newman

#35. You can't stop being a citizen just because you have a Screen Actors' Guild card.

Paul Newman

#36. I have taken roads that I wished I had not traveled on. And I'm traveling on some pretty exciting ones, too.

Paul Newman

#37. I want to acknowledge luck, the benevolence of it in my life, and the brutality of it in the lives of others.

Paul Newman

#38. The spaghetti sauce is a good thing to think about. Morning, noon, and night, think about the spaghetti sauce. Think about hustling other people to buy the spaghetti sauce.

Paul Newman

#39. I can eat fifty eggs.

Paul Newman

#40. Fill the moment and find variety.

Paul Newman

#41. How many honest men do you know? Take the sinners away from the saints, you're lucky to end up with Abraham Lincoln.

Paul Newman

#42. From salad dressings all blessings flow.

Paul Newman

#43. Well, the nice thing about animation, you don't even really have to account for yourself. All of the physical stuff that you work on as an actor, you just throw away.

Paul Newman

#44. Choose between yesterday and tomorrow.

Paul Newman

#45. No sense in being a grifter if it's the same as being a citizen.

Paul Newman

#46. You say somebody's guilty, everybody believes you. You say they're innocent, nobody cares.

Paul Newman

#47. Sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.

Paul Newman

#48. Show me a good loser and I will show you a loser.

Paul Newman

#49. People stay married because they want to, not because the doors are locked.

Paul Newman

#50. Dreams without movement are delusions, escapes, kid's play. You have to put your feet into your dreams if they're ever going to be reality. The dreamers we know and love today are the ones who worked the hardest

Paul Newman

#51. You only grow when you are alone.

Paul Newman

#52. I'd like to be remembered as a guy who tried - who tried to be part of his times, tried to help people communicate with one another, tried to find some decency in his own life, tried to extend himself as a human being. Someone who isn't complacent, who doesn't cop out.

Paul Newman

#53. Being on President Nixon's enemies list was the highest single honor I've ever received. Who knows who's listening to me now and what government list I'm on?

Paul Newman

#54. The star of oil and vinegar and the oil and vinegar of the stars.

Paul Newman

#55. You got to have two things to win. You got to have brains and you got to have balls. Now you've got too much of one and not enough of the other.

Paul Newman

#56. If you're playing a poker game and you look around the table and and can't tell who the sucker is, it's you.

Paul Newman

#57. The best thing you can give yourselves ... is the gift of possibility. And the best thing you can give each other is the pledge to go on protecting that gift in each other as long as you live.

Paul Newman

#58. Honey, Don't go shooting all the dogs 'cause one of them's got fleas

Paul Newman

#59. I wasn't driven to acting by any inner compulsion. I was running away from the sporting goods business.

Paul Newman

#60. I would like it if people would think that beyond Newman, there's a spirit that takes action, a heart, and a talent that doesn't come from my blue eyes.

Paul Newman

#61. Building weapons that we don't need, don't work, and aren't necessary, and have no mission - that's not bad politics, that's robbery.

Paul Newman

#62. I have an extraordinary attention span. I manage to juggle two or three different ideas at the same time, and that's probably, if I have a gift, that's probably the best gift that's given me.

Paul Newman

#63. What could be better than to hold your hand out to people less fortunate than you are?

Paul Newman

#64. The only question I ever ask any woman is, 'what time is your husband coming home?'

Paul Newman

#65. It's really important to be attentive to the people who have less - who are less fortunate than you are.

Paul Newman

#66. I think Hollywood is in love with sequels. If it's successful once, just jazz it up and shoot it out there again. I think it's unfortunate.

Paul Newman

#67. Make sure you live life, which means don't do things where you court celebrity, and give something positive back to our society.

Paul Newman

#68. It's always darkest before it turns absolutely pitch black.

Paul Newman

#69. A feud should live a full and colorful life, and then it should die a natural death and be forgotten.

Paul Newman

#70. Men experience many passions in a lifetime. One passion drives away the one before it.

Paul Newman

#71. I had no natural gift to be anything - not an athlete, not an actor, not a writer, not a director, a painter of garden porches - not anything. So I've worked really hard, because nothing ever came easily to me.

Paul Newman

#72. Almost everything I learned about being an actor came from those early years at the Actor's Studio.

Paul Newman

#73. We've polluted the stratosphere with these chlorine and bromine compounds, and because it's now colder, and because we have this change in the climate, we're getting more ozone loss than we would have gotten in a normal year.

Paul Newman

#74. There are three rules for running a business; fortunately, we don't know any of them.

Paul Newman

#75. I'm a great believer in luck and the extraordinary role that plays in all of our lives.

Paul Newman

#76. To be an actor you have to be a child.

Paul Newman

#77. I was always a character actor. I just looked like Little Red Riding Hood.

Paul Newman

#78. The problem with getting older is you still remember how things used to be.

Paul Newman

#79. Natural law. Sons are put on this earth to trouble their fathers.

Paul Newman

#80. The embarrassing thing is that my salad dressing is out-grossing my films.

Paul Newman

#81. From the very beginning, we bucked tradition. When the experts said that something was "always done" in a certain way, we'd do it our way, which was sometimes the very opposite.

Paul Newman

#82. Once I started taking drama classes, I asked myself why I had ever wasted so much time on a football team.

Paul Newman

#83. If I ever feel like I'm doing something I've done before, I scrap it and start over again.

Paul Newman

#84. A man can only be judged by his actions, and not by his good intentions or his beliefs

Paul Newman

#85. While progress should never come to a halt, there are many places it should never come to at all.

Paul Newman

#86. Of course I know Julie Andrews. She's the last of the really great broads.

Paul Newman

#87. On considering adultery - Why go out for hamburger when I can have steak at home?

Paul Newman

#88. I've been accused of being aloof. I'm not. I'm just wary.

Paul Newman

#89. [Getting the truth in the New York Post has been as] difficult as finding a good hamburger in Albania.

Paul Newman

#90. It seems to me that the older I get, the more running around I do with less satisfaction, just spinning my wheels.

Paul Newman

#91. Winning isn't everything ... it's just all there is.

Paul Newman

#92. Where the hell are the singing cats?

Paul Newman

#93. What we got here is a failure to communicate.

Paul Newman

#94. When you see the right thing to do, you'd better do it.

Paul Newman

#95. The need is great and so are the opportunities to make a difference.

Paul Newman

#96. On adultery: Why fool around with hamburger when you have steak at home?

Paul Newman

#97. It's like chasing a beautiful woman for 80 years. Finally, she relents and you say, 'I'm terribly sorry. I'm tired.' [After winning his first Oscar after so many losses]

Paul Newman

#98. I cannot bear to look at a film that I made before 1990. Maybe 1985. There's no sense even trying to explain it. I really just can't watch myself. I see all the machinery at work and it just drives me nuts, so I don't look at anything.

Paul Newman

#99. I certainly never expected to be a professional actor. I never expected to be in movies. I thought I would probably become a teacher.

Paul Newman

#100. A man with no enemies is a man with no character.

Paul Newman