Best 25 quotes of Budd Schulberg on MyQuotes

As much as I love boxing, I hate it. And as much as I hate it, I love it.

Boxing is a mental sport. Think of a prizefight as a chess game of mind and body, and you are a little closer to it than if you compare it to a bloody brawl in an alley.

Conscience. That stuff can drive you nuts.

Fights can be dumped in a dozen ways. Sometimes everybody but the fighter knows. Sometimes only the fighter knows.

I coulda' had class. I coulda' been a contender! But instead I got a one way ticket to Palookaville.

I’d like to be remembered as someone who used their ability as a novelist or as a dramatist to say the things he felt needed to be said about the society while being as entertaining as possible. Because if you don’t entertain, nobody’s listening.

I don't like the country. The crickets make me nervous.

In English the expression 'ancient Greece' includes the meaning of 'finished,' whereas for us Greece goes on living, for better or for worse; it is in life, has not expired yet.

Isn't everyone a part of everyone else?

Living with a conscience is like driving a car with the brakes on.

Silence is the sure sign that youre on your way out in Hollywood.

Tell Papa I admire him but from now on I plan to admire him from as far away as I can get.

Unless we know people well, we sit around with our words and our minds starched, afraid of being ourselves for fear of wrinkling them.

Very few fighters get the consideration of racehorses, which are put out to pasture to grow old with dignity and comfort when they haven't got it anymore.

You can't eat your friends and have them too

You either go along with the system - conform to what is expected to be a hit - or you have very tough going

You know what's wrong with our waterfront? It's the love of a lousy buck. It's making the love of a buck, the cushy job, more important than the love of man. It's forgetting that every fellow down here's your brother in Christ.

¡A la mierda! ¡El que quiera leer a Rimbaud que aprenda francés!

First, no qualms. Not the thinnest sliver of misgiving about the value of his work. He was able to feel that the most important job in the world was putting over Monsoon. In the second place, he was as uninhibited as a performing seal. He never questioned his right to monopolize conversations or his ability to do it entertainingly. And then there was his colossal lack of perspective. This was one of his most valuable gifts, for perspective doesn't always pay. It can slow you down.

Going through life with a conscience is like driving your car with the brakes on.

It made me uncomfortable. I guess I've always been afraid of people who can be agile without grace.

Never talk to waiters like that," Kit said. "Can I help it," he said, "if I only went one year to finishing school?" "It isn't manners," she said like a sensible schoolteacher quietly disciplining a small boy, "it just isn't smart." I thought of the time I first told him not to say ain't. He took this the same way, a little peeved but making mental notes. I noticed he was never too much of an egotist to take criticism when he knew it would help. It was part of his genius for self-propulsion. I was beginning to see what Kit had for Sammy. Of course she stood for something never within his reach before. But it was more than that. Sammy seemed to know that his career was entering a new cycle where polish paid off. You could almost see him filing off the rough edges against the sharp blade of her mind.

The principal furniture in Billie's mind was a good-sized bed.

There was a lull. Sammy was staring across the room at George Opdyke, the three-time Pulitzer Prize winner. I was about to say he was lost in thought, but Sammy was never really lost, and he never actually thought, for that implied deep reflection. He was figuring. Miss Goldblum edged her undernourished white hand into his. Sammy played with it absent-mindedly, like a piece of silverware.

Very much on the defensive, I admitted that I liked to read. "Sure," Sammy said, "I never said I had anything against reading books..." "The publishers will be relieved to know that," I tried to insert, but Sammy was too quick for me and was already rounding the bend of his next sentence.