Budd Schulberg Quotes

#1. You either go along with the system - conform to what is expected to be a hit - or you have very tough going.

Budd Schulberg

#2. Hey, you want to hear my philosophy of life? Do it to him before he does it to you.

Budd Schulberg

#3. You know what's wrong with our waterfront? It's the love of a lousy buck. It's making the love of a buck, the cushy job, more important than the love of man. It's forgetting that every fellow down here's your brother in Christ.

Budd Schulberg

#4. Isn't everyone a part of everyone else?

Budd Schulberg

#5. I believed him because the truth is never hard to recognize. Nothing is ever quite so drab and repetitious and forlorn and ludicrous as truth.

Budd Schulberg

#6. I coulda' had class. I coulda' been a contender! But instead I got a one way ticket to Palookaville.

Budd Schulberg

#7. Most of us are ready to greet our worst enemies like long-lost brothers if we think they can show us a good time, if we think they can do us any good or if we even reach the conclusion that being polite will get us just as far and help us live longer.

Budd Schulberg

#8. I don't like the country. The crickets make me nervous.

Budd Schulberg

#9. He was one of those magnificent fakes who could overwhelm himself with his own sincerity.

Budd Schulberg

#10. The Pastor had spent his boyhood in the old country and was not at all sure that hot water, stall showers and the like were necessary to salvation. In fact it was one of his notions that Americans were too clean. Rub all the natural protective oils off their skins, they do for a fact.

Budd Schulberg

#11. I suppose it's too bad people can't be a little more consistent. But if they were, maybe they would stop being people.

Budd Schulberg

#12. Conscience. That stuff can drive you nuts.

Budd Schulberg

#13. When Kit called me for the next meeting I was either not myself or too much myself.

Budd Schulberg

#14. Boxing is a mental sport. Think of a prizefight as a chess game of mind and body, and you are a little closer to it than if you compare it to a bloody brawl in an alley.

Budd Schulberg

#15. Jesus had many lovers of the kingdom of heaven but precious few bearers of his cross. Father Barry read on: ... Interrogate

Budd Schulberg

#16. Silence is the sure sign that you're on your way out in Hollywood.

Budd Schulberg

#17. You can't eat your friends and have them too.

Budd Schulberg

#18. Work hard, and if you can't work hard, be smart; and, if you can't be smart, be loud.

Budd Schulberg

#19. Living with a conscience is like driving with the brakes on.

Budd Schulberg

#20. In English the expression 'ancient Greece' includes the meaning of 'finished,' whereas for us Greece goes on living, for better or for worse; it is in life, has not expired yet.

Budd Schulberg

#21. I could have had class. I could have been a contender.

Budd Schulberg

#22. It's queer to think how many little guys there are like that, with more ability than push, sucked in by one wave and hurled out by the next, for every Sammy Glick who slips through and over the waves like a porpoise.

Budd Schulberg

#23. Very few fighters get the consideration of racehorses, which are put out to pasture to grow old with dignity and comfort when they haven't got it anymore.

Budd Schulberg

#24. I'd like to be remembered as someone who used their ability as a novelist or as a dramatist to say the things he felt needed to be said about the society while being as entertaining as possible. Because if you don't entertain, nobody's listening.

Budd Schulberg

#25. Fights can be dumped in a dozen ways. Sometimes everybody but the fighter knows. Sometimes only the fighter knows.

Budd Schulberg

#26. The principal furniture in Billie's mind was a good-sized bed.

Budd Schulberg

#27. As much as I love boxing, I hate it. And as much as I hate it, I love it.

Budd Schulberg

#28. Unless we know people well, we sit around with our words and our minds starched, afraid of being ourselves for fear of wrinkling them.

Budd Schulberg

#29. Very much on the defensive, I admitted that I liked to read.
"Sure," Sammy said, "I never said I had anything against reading books ... "
"The publishers will be relieved to know that," I tried to insert, but Sammy was too quick for me and was already rounding the bend of his next sentence.

Budd Schulberg

#30. They looked at each other until they weren't acquaintances any longer.

Budd Schulberg

#31. When we left, the sun was taking its evening dip, slipping down into the ocean inch by inch like a fat woman afraid of the water.

Budd Schulberg

#32. Tell Papa I admire him but from now on I plan to admire him from as far away as I can get.

Budd Schulberg