Paul Newman Quotes - Page 5

The accusation is always on the first page, and the retraction on page 19.

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.

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.

Now then, if we were to go the lowest road and plaster my face on the bottle of oil and vinegar dressing just to line our pockets, it would sink. But to go the low road to get to the high road- shameless exploitation for charity, for the common good- now that's an idea worth the hustle, a reciprocal trade agreement.

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.

I like racing but food and pictures are more thrilling. I can't give them up. In racing you can be certain, to the last thousandth of a second, that someone is the best, but with a film or a recipe, there is no way of knowing how all the ingredients will work out in the end. The best can turn out to be awful and the worst can be fantastic. Cooking is like performing and performing like cooking.

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

I am convinced that a person is entitled to as much privacy as he wants. It should be his privilege to keep certain areas of his life out of the newspapers.

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.

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

Acting isn't really a creative profession. It's an interpretative one.

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

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

I'm a very competitive person. I always have been. And it's hard to be competitive about something as amorphous as acting. But you can be competitive on the track, because the rules are very simple and the declaration of the winner is very concise.

Newman's second law: Just when things look darkest, they go black.

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

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.

A rebel is a nonconformist who is constantly saying no, and I'm not that. I'm a conformist and I believe in progress, and you can't make much progress by saying no all the time. A rebel is destructive. I know I have something constructive to offer.

I can eat fifty eggs.

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

If you have no enemies, you have no character.

So I've worked really hard, because nothing ever came easily to me.

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.

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.

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