Top 100 Paul Newman Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Our marriage works because we each carry clubs of equal weight and size.”

— Paul Newman

52. “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.”

— Paul Newman

53. “Newman’s first law: It is useless to put on your brakes when you’re upside down.”

— Paul Newman

54. “To be an actor you have to be a child.”

— Paul Newman

55. “I don’t think there’s anything exceptional or noble in being philanthropic. It’s the other attitude that confuses me.”

— Paul Newman

56. “I’ve been accused of being aloof. I’m not. I’m just wary.”

— Paul Newman

57. “There are three rules for running a business; fortunately, we don’t know any of them.”

— Paul Newman

58. “What could be better than to hold your hand out to people less fortunate than you are?”

— Paul Newman

59. “A feud should live a full and colorful life, and then it should die a natural death and be forgotten.”

— Paul Newman

60. “Newman’s second law: Just when things look darkest, they go black.”

— Paul Newman

61. “It’s really important to be attentive to the people who have less – who are less fortunate than you are.”

— Paul Newman

62. “We are such spendthrifts with our lives, the trick of living is to slip on and off the planet with the least fuss you can muster. I’m not running for sainthood. I just happen to think that in life we need to be a little like the farmer, who puts back into the soil what he takes out.”

— Paul Newman

63. “At the beginning of your career, it’s ‘Who is Paul Newman?’ and then it’s ‘Get me Paul Newman.’ Then it’s ‘Get me a young Paul Newman.’ Then it’s ‘Who is Paul Newman?’”

— Paul Newman

64. “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.”

— Paul Newman

65. “From salad dressings all blessings flow.”

— Paul Newman

66. “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.”

— Paul Newman

67. “I’m a great believer in luck and the extraordinary role that plays in all of our lives.”

— Paul Newman

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

— Paul Newman

69. “You can’t really appreciate anonymity until you’ve lost it. People say that’s sour grapes, but it really isn’t To be able to walk down the street without people paying attention to you is a real blessing and you lose it when you become an actor.”

— Paul Newman

70. “Fill the moment and find variety.”

— Paul Newman

71. “People like to do what they used to do after they’ve stopped being able to do it.”

— Paul Newman

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

— Paul Newman

73. “People stay married because they want to, not because the doors are locked.”

— Paul Newman

74. “Who’s to say who’s an expert?”

— Paul Newman

75. “Twenty-five years ago I couldn’t walk down the street without being recognized. Now I can put a cap on, walk anywhere and no one pays me any attention. They don’t ask me about my movies and they don’t ask me about my salad dressing because they don’t know who I am. Am I happy about this? You bet.”

— Paul Newman

76. “Make sure you live life, which means don’t do things where you court celebrity, and give something positive back to our society.”

— Paul Newman

77. “It seems to me that the older I get, the more running around I do with less satisfaction, just spinning my wheels.”

— Paul Newman

78. “So I’ve worked really hard, because nothing ever came easily to me.”

— Paul Newman

79. “I never ask my wife about my flaws. Instead I try to get her to ignore them and concentrate on my sense of humor.”

— Paul Newman

80. “The Alexander Technique helped a long-standing back problem and to get a good night’s sleep after many years of tossing and turning.”

— Paul Newman

81. “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.”

— Paul Newman

82. “From the very beginning, we bucked tradition. When the experts said that something was “always done” in a certain way, we’d do it our way, which was sometimes the very opposite.”

— Paul Newman

83. “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.”

— Paul Newman

84. “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.”

— Paul Newman

85. “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.”

— Paul Newman

86. “Once I started taking drama classes, I asked myself why I had ever wasted so much time on a football team.”

— Paul Newman

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

— Paul Newman

88. “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.”

— Paul Newman

89. “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.”

— Paul Newman

90. “For those of you who like to scarf your popcorn in the sack, the good news is that Newman’s Own contains an aphrodisiac.”

— Paul Newman

91. “The characters I have the least in common with are the ones I have the greatest success with. The further a role is from my own experience, the more I try to deepen it.”

— Paul Newman

92. “It’s absolutely amazing that I survived all the booze and smoking and the cars and the career.”

— Paul Newman

93. “I was always a character actor. I just looked like Little Red Riding Hood.”

— Paul Newman

94. “You can’t be as old as I am without waking up with a surprised look on your face every morning.”

— Paul Newman

95. “Acting is like letting your pants down; you’re exposed.”

— Paul Newman

96. “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.”

— Paul Newman

97. “Almost everything I learned about being an actor came from those early years at the Actor’s Studio.”

— Paul Newman

98. “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.”

— Paul Newman

99. “I just hope when my body goes, or when my mind does, I have the guts to end it the way Hemingway did. I don’t want anybody wiping drool off my chin.”

— Paul Newman

100. “I cannot bear to look at a film that I made before 1990. Maybe 1985. There’s no sense even trying to explain it. I really just can’t watch myself. I see all the machinery at work and it just drives me nuts, so I don’t look at anything.”

— Paul Newman