Paul Newman Quotes
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The embarrassing thing is that the salad dressing is outgrossing my films.
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.
I picture my epitaph: "Here lies Paul Newman, who died a failure because his eyes turned brown."
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.
If you don't have enemies, you don't have character.
It is useless to put on your brakes when you're upside down.
Just when things look darkest, they go black.
Acting isn't really a creative profession. It's an interpretative one.
I'm a supporter of gay rights. And not a closet supporter either. From the time I was a kid, I have never been able to understand attacks upon the gay community. There are so many qualities that make up a human being... by the time I get through with all the things that I really admire about people, what they do with their private parts is probably so low on the list that it is irrelevant.
Each town has its own allure and it has its own character. This race would be different from Long Beach, it would be different from Edmonton, and you guys will put your own signature on it. It's a reciprocal trade agreement. Champ Car gets a great race, and you get a great three-day festival, so everybody wins.
Racing here for me is muscle memory. Running at the limit is just kind of average. You are always trying to go as fast as you can go. If you can do it one lap, the next lap can be just as easy until you get tired.
It seems to me that the older I get, the more running around I do with less satisfaction, just spinning my wheels...To come up here and just get in the car where there are no telephones and nobody to bother you, you can just run around out there and see how fast you can go. It's just fun.
I just try to get through the day.
I check my pulse and if I can find it, I know I've got a chance.
The star of oil and vinegar and the oil and vinegar of the stars.
In racing, the fastest person wins. It is very simple.
There are many ingredients that go into making a film. It baffles me, what works and what doesn’t.
I'd done some acting in high school. Then I went to Kenyon College [Gambler, Ohio] and got thrown in jail and kicked off the football team. Since I was determined not to study very much, I majored in theater the last two years. Got my degree in speech; they didn't actually have a degree in theater. I graduated at two o'clock in the afternoon, and at three-thirty I was on the train for Williams Bay, Wisconsin, for summer stock, and then I did winter stock. Then my father died, and I came back to Cleveland and worked in his sporting goods store for about a year. Then I went to Yale for a year.
I didn't have anything to run for that really grabbed me, except what I happened to be doing, which was the theater. 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.
It was luck. I'd been shooting a film in France, and I was supposed to follow it up with another film, which fell through. I think Robert Rossen had actually signed somebody else to play Fast Eddie, and then he found out I was available, and called me and said, "Can I send you a script?" I read half of it, and called my New York agent at six o'clock in the morning and said, "Get me this film." And he did, but if the other one had worked out, I would have had to do it. So, again, I keep reiterating, it's about being in the right place at the right time, and I really have to acknowledge that. As far as The Hustler is concerned, it was probably important in that it gave me a lot of confidence. Working with Rossen was wonderful. I can't remember changing a single line in the script once we got it, though Rossen did add one scene.
If you start thinking that's the single ingredient that makes you successful, it really undermines your sense of your own value. Incidentally, I'm actually someone who laughs a lot. I really am a joker. But if you ask serious questions, you get serious answers.
I think transitions are never that noticeable, but they are always on their way. It has to do with distance and accessibility. People call it mellowing, but I think it's how available you are toward other people, or how much you distance yourself. Tennessee had a great expression. He said, "If I seem distant, it's not that other people's arms are so long; it's that mine are so short." I think a lot of people find themselves in that situation. As an actor, you have a tendency in your youth to go toward characters. As time passes, I find that I insist on drawing the characters toward me, though I can switch back in the other direction too.
As a career? Good lord, no. But I've had much more a sense of things happening to me than being the person who forced the issue. Going back to what we were talking about before, I wasn't running toward the theater but running away from the sporting goods store. Of course now that I'm selling spaghetti sauce, I begin to understand the romance of business - the allure of being the biggest fish in the pond and the juice you get from beating out your competitors. We don't take ourselves very seriously as businesspeople, but considering this was something that started off as a joke in 1982, we have had a lot of fun giving away . . . I think it's ninety million bucks to various charities.
When the idea came up, I said, "Are you crazy? Stick my face on the label of salad dressing?" And then, of course, we got the whole idea of exploitation and how circular it is. Why not, really, go to the fullest length, and the silliest length, in exploiting yourself and turn the proceeds back to the community?
Well, that isn't so bad. I think what would really be terrible would be to watch a retrospective and see yourself age forty years over a period of forty-five minutes. That'd be traumatic. And maybe one day I'll be able to go back and look at those old films with a charitable eye. The hard part is not to add any ornaments or embellishments to your memory of them. But maybe that's asking the impossible.
I have taken roads that I wished I had not traveled on. And I'm traveling on some pretty exciting ones, too. Just hope when you get to that great racetrack in the sky, that the balance will tip slightly into those things that you'd be proud of.
Necessity is the motherfucker of invention.
When I realised I was going to have to be a whore, to put my face on the label, I decided that the only way I could do it was to give away all the money we make. Over the years, that ethical stance has given us a 30 per cent boost. One in three customers buys my products because all the profits go to good causes and the rest buy the stuff because it is good.
The McDonald's deal means we will be able to give away 30 per cent more. We only work on low-fat products and, unlike any other supplier, we have total control over marketing of our products. That's a good deal all round.
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 theatre. And they say showbusiness is odd.
We didn't know beans about beans at the beginning, but we had $40,000 and a challenge that we thought would be fun. We poked around and asked each other "What do you think of that?" Salt? Yeah. Maybe a little. And more lemon.' We trusted half a dozen or so people and we still do. The most important ingredient was not taking ourselves too seriously.
It's born of sheer laziness. My signature dishes are salads, hamburgers and popcorn. That's not the kind of stuff that gets you an entry in the distinguished book of culinary records. Being known for great soufflé is one thing but a good hamburger? What would they say? "Yeah, he really knew how to put the cheese on.”
I think there is nothing but foam up here now. The memory and the acuity are beginning to falter and I don't have things at my fingertips like I used to. That's frightening because it means that soon I will not be capable of the level of work I have been doing. One day, when the restaurant is done, Joanne will finish up her work at the Playhouse and I will finish movies, food and racing but neither my cooking nor my film career is over yet. I'm like a good cheese. I'm just getting moldy enough to be interesting.
I keep trying to retire from everything and I've discovered that I've retired from absolutely nothing. I was going to get out of the racing business and I'm back in the racing business. I was going to let somebody else handle all the spaghetti sauce and I'm back in the spaghetti sauce. I just finished the first play that I've done in 35 years, which is like sticking a rifle in your mouth. So, I don't seem to be able to retire.
There's still a little vinegar left in the old dog yet.
You say I'm an icon. I don't say it. My grandchild does not think I'm an icon.
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.
I don't think about any of that stuff. What you're able to achieve on the screen has nothing to do with you. The only thing sometimes I think is that you pick up certain mannerisms from characters that you play and they become part of the way you present yourself. The only two things that ever stuck to me were, unfortunately, from Rocky Graziano. I never used to spit in the street and I was with Rocky for about nine weeks before the picture began filming, and I spit in the street. It sickens my wife. I never used to swear. I never used any kind of foul language. Now, it's not worth being in the same room with me. And it's funny, of all the attributes that could have stuck to me, that those were the two that stuck the strongest and the longest. But I don't take much of it seriously. I really don't. And that's all I have to say about that.
I insist on it. I insist on two weeks of rehearsal, which I do for nothing, and that has happened in almost every picture I've done since 1954.
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.
Because I just had my first two grandchildren. I want them to have a future filled with opportunity and the best education possible. But not every child is as lucky.
About fifty cents out of every discretionary dollar spent by Congress now go to the Pentagon budget, while just six cents go to educating our children and four cents go to health care. That’s too much for Pentagon defense contractors and too little for our children’s education and our families’ health care.
The only way we can give our children the best education in the world and prepare them for the next century is by funding the programs that serve them.
Just because you come up against a wall doesn’t mean you quit. I think, little by little, people are beginning to understand there’s a lot of pork out there, in almost every area.
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.
I had such a string of good fortune in my life, but these kids have been brutalized by luck and most won't get the chance to turn it around. Those who are most lucky should hold their hands out to those who aren't.
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.
Gather the troops inside the wall and storm the gates. Young people are the real hope for change in this area. It may take some time, but it will happen.
We're successful because we don't take ourselves too seriously.
If you don't believe the legend... then you can't really take yourself seriously. And if you don't take yourself seriously, you've got a chance. It's when you take yourself seriously and you begin to believe all this bullshit that you can really founder.
From the beginning, our management philosophy was, 'If we ever have a plan, we're through.’
The whole sense of how people eat becomes important to more and more people, so it seemed a natural.
There are three rules for running a business; fortunately, we don't know any of them.
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?
Study your craft and know who you are and what’s special about you. Find out what everyone does on a film set, ask questions and listen. Make sure you live life, which means don’t do things where you court celebrity, and give something positive back to our society.
Let’s just say we better make the movie soon before Redford gets too old.
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. That’s a creative arc for you, isn’t it?
Paul Newman Quotes
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