Explore Quotes by Paul Newman

Newman's first law: It is useless to put on your brakes when you're upside down.

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.

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

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.

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

I wish I could recall with clarity the impulse that compelled me to help bring this camp into being. I'd be pleased if I could announce a motive of lofty purpose. I've been accused of compassion, of altruism, of devotion to Christian, Hebrew, and Muslim ethic, but however desperate I am to claim ownership of a high ideal, I cannot. 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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's absolutely amazing that I survived all the booze and smoking and the cars and the career.

You say somebody’s guilty, everybody believes you. You say they’re innocent, nobody cares.

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.

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

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.