A biography for Paul Newmanhasn’t been written yet.
“Every time we get into an argument about cooking or laundering shirts, she shakes her Oscar at me, and I'm dead in the water. It would be a great equalizer now after 33 years.”
“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.”
“It's kind of like those little electric bumper cars where you drive around and see if you can hit the other guy. That's exactly what the country is like now. You no longer have the sense of community. Of loyalty. It's lost its sense of group. It has nothing to do with leadership.”
“George Roy Hill, Redford, and I have been looking for a script to do together for 13 years. We haven't been able to find one that we liked enough for the three of us to be in it together.”
“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.”
“So you wound up with Apollo. If he's sometimes hard to swallow. Use this.”
“I'm not able to work anymore as an actor and still at the level I would want to... you start to lose your memory. You start to lose your confidence. You start to lose your invention. So, that's pretty much a closed book for me.”
“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.”
“You only grow when you are alone.”
“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.”
“Acting isn't really a creative profession. It's an interpretative one.”
“There are places you go, and they say, 'Take off your dark glasses so we can see your beautiful blue eyes.' And you just want to... you just want to... I dunno, um... thump them.”
“To be an actor you have to be a child.”
“Money won is twice as sweet as money earned.”
“Newman's first law: It is useless to put on your brakes when you're upside down.”