“To be an actor you have to be a child.”
“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.”
“If you don’t have enemies, you don’t have character.”
“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.”
“Newman’s first law: It is useless to put on your brakes when you’re upside down.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Show me a good loser and I will show you a loser.”
“Money won is twice as sweet as money earned.”
“Newman’s second law: Just when things look darkest, they go black.”
“The Sixties – I had to have my foot in everything then. I’m doing the same thing now but through an intermediary. You know. The food company. Maybe that’s the way to go about it. You go right straight into the inferno, and when you get older, you pull back.”
“Who’s to say who’s an expert?”
“People stay married because they want to, not because the doors are locked.”
“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.”
“So you wound up with Apollo. If he’s sometimes hard to swallow. Use this.”
“I was always a character actor. I just looked like Little Red Riding Hood.”
“The star of oil and vinegar and the oil and vinegar of the stars.”
“Acting isn’t really a creative profession. It’s an interpretative one.”
“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.”
“What is the difference between a truly creative artist and an interpretive artist? I have not concluded anything about that, but it’s fair to ask the question.”
“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 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.”
“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.”
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