Top 57 Quotes & Sayings by Sterling Hayden

Explore popular quotes and sayings by Sterling Hayden.

Last updated on November 8, 2024.

Sterling Walter Hayden was an American actor, author, sailor and decorated Marine Corps officer and an Office of Strategic Services' agent during World War II. A leading man for most of his career, he specialized in westerns and film noir throughout the 1950s, in films such as John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle (1950), Nicholas Ray's Johnny Guitar (1954), and Stanley Kubrick's The Killing (1956). He became noted for supporting roles in the 1960s, perhaps most memorably as General Jack D. Ripper in Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964).

Source: Wikipedia

I brag like hell when I'm confident of what I'm doing. Back when I was sailing ships for a living, I would take a schooner up to San Francisco - I had my master's certificate at 22 - and I would tell myself, 'There isn't a man in the world can do this better 'n I can.' And I meant it.

Sterling Hayden

You become trapped doing bad movies. And, the thing that makes it difficult to stop making them is that you get good money.

Sterling Hayden

I felt reluctant accepting the very lucrative and easy life Hollywood had offered me. All of it planted a seed: If I could do something about the conditions of the world, I could probably justify my position as an actor.

Sterling Hayden

Tahiti has always been like a girl. She should be approached with caution, taking plenty of time and be enjoyed. Instead tourists with plenty of money are flinging themselves on the island and destroying the place.

Sterling Hayden

I am an expert in loneliness and have wandered around a great deal.

Sterling Hayden

John Brown was one of my longtime heroes, and it was with no little amount of temerity that I accepted the role. There are some things I am hesitant about, and playing a hero of mine is one of them.

Sterling Hayden

Audiences may not realize it, but heroes and leading men always depend on their muscles to get out of jams. They don't have to slug a guy in the mouth to solve a problem, but it's always hinted that he can fight like the heavyweight champ if he has to.

Sterling Hayden

Out of 35 pictures I made, 30 were ridiculous.

Sterling Hayden

I think my opinion of Hollywood must stem from my own, philosophy as a man.

Sterling Hayden

You can measure a man's capacity by the depth of his mistakes.

Sterling Hayden

I have no respect for acting where I'm concerned.

Sterling Hayden

I always hated acting but I kept on acting.

Sterling Hayden

The number of fights in movies is haywire.

Sterling Hayden

Tahiti is now completely occupied by materialistic ideas and I think it is wrong.

Sterling Hayden

I live and work for the pure enjoyment of being alive.

Sterling Hayden

I realize now that it is a serious business requiring honest, hard work. The first time Hollywood was served up to me on a silver platter. I've finally gotten rid of the platter.

Sterling Hayden

At heart, I'm not an actor, I'm an accident.

Sterling Hayden

I never liked the movie life. I was in it to raise enough money to buy my schooner.

Sterling Hayden

If you stop to think, the only films that don't include at least one punch in -the jaw are musical comedies. And even then some of those villains get brained in the middle of an aria.

Sterling Hayden

I've got a fetish about motors on sail boats. Sailboats were meant to sail.

Sterling Hayden

Once I tried to do Jack London's 'Sea Wolf' as a picture. I wanted to film most of the scenes at sea but ran into opposition from those who wanted studio sets.

Sterling Hayden

I was navigator on the Gloucester schooner 'Gertrude L. Thebaud' in the International Fisherman's race. That's a big thing in New England - the race, I mean. A Boston newspaper man covered it, and saw me on board. For a long time I wished he hadn't! He wrote a piece saying I ought to be in motion pictures.

Sterling Hayden

In fact, there are only two things in this world that I'm crazy about, boats arid women.

Sterling Hayden

I work in pictures when I have to. In 1979 that was one day's work.

Sterling Hayden

I feel sometimes as though I've never grown up. And that's great, because it means there are still possibilities. Nothing's free. You pay for whatever you get. But that's OK, because you can't be cheated.

Sterling Hayden

I don't remember even having spoken a piece in Sunday school.

Sterling Hayden

When I was a kid and getting paid to stand in front of a camera. I used to spend a lot of my time just laughing inside about the whole thing. It wasn't real to me. I couldn't act and I damn well knew it. I kept expecting someone to see the joke and call the whole thing off at any moment. Fortunately, no one ever did.

Sterling Hayden

Only when a film comes along that I really believe in like this one will I turn to acting.

Sterling Hayden

I've been offered the role of Franklin Roosevelt, and I wouldn't presume to undertake it.

Sterling Hayden

I'm an alcoholic.

Sterling Hayden

I don't guess anybody likes the idea of being locked up.

Sterling Hayden

There's nothing wrong with being an actor, if that's what a man wants. But there's everything wrong with achieving an exalted status, simply because one photographs well and is able to handle dialogue put in one's mouth by others.

Sterling Hayden

Bahamians are wonderful seamen.

Sterling Hayden

It's a presumptuous thing to write one's autobiography, but this is really an effort in the deepest sense to explore the struggle of a tortured individual to be himself in a hostile society.

Sterling Hayden

I ran away to sea. I know that only happens in fiction. But it's what I did.

Sterling Hayden

When they saddle the leading man with violence it makes the characters look weak. If a man is a heroic type he doesn't have to resort to violence. How many successful men in the world have to settle problems with their fists?

Sterling Hayden

Sooner or later a man has simply got to do what he thinks is right, no matter what other people, or the courts, or his friends, or his enemies, or God himself may tell him.

Sterling Hayden

As a child I was told if I was ever given ruled paper I should write across the lines. And that's what I've done, traveling the roads with the least traffic.

Sterling Hayden

All I need is a place to put my things, somewhere to lay a mattress.

Sterling Hayden

You can't just run away from everything.

Sterling Hayden

For us to support the liquidation of a simple life in a large part of the world is not a particularly attractive prospect.

Sterling Hayden

Normality is boring.

Sterling Hayden

I don't call myself a writer, much as I'd love to be. An author, maybe - the novel 'Voyage' made $870,000. Writer, no. Nor am I an actor. I was never on the stage.

Sterling Hayden

I got stardom too easily. I didn't appreciate the breaks. But that's all behind me now.

Sterling Hayden

I was surprised when they sent me to Hollywood, Then I thought as soon as they discovered my 14 fathom greenness, I'd be out on my ear. But everything kept going.

Sterling Hayden

Actually, I wish I did nothing but write. Acting takes a lot of heat off of me monetarily but it puts a lot of beat on me emotionally.

Sterling Hayden

I've always wanted to sail to the South Seas, but I can't afford it. What these men can't afford is not to go. They are enmeshed in the cancerous discipline of security. And in the worship of security we fling our lives beneath the wheels of routine — and before we know it our lives are gone.

Sterling Hayden

The years thunder by, The dreams of youth grow dim where they lie caked in dust on the shelves of patience. Before we know it, the tomb is sealed.

Sterling Hayden

There's is not enough money in Hollywood to lure me into making another picture with Joan Crawford. And I like money.

Sterling Hayden

A sailing ship is no democracy; you don't caucus a crew as to where you'll go anymore than you inquire when they'd like to shorten sail.

Sterling Hayden

Somehow it is the male's duty to put the best years of his life into work he doesn't like in order that he may "retire" and enjoy himself as soon as he is too old to do so. This is more than just the system - it is the credo. It is the same thing that prompted Thoreau to say, in 1839: 'The majority of men lead lives of quiet desperation.'

Sterling Hayden

Deterrence is the art of producing, in the mind of the enemy, the fear to attack.

Sterling Hayden

Wind is to us what money is to life on shore.

Sterling Hayden

To be truly challenging, a voyage, like a life, must rest on a firm foundation of financial unrest. Otherwise, you are doomed to a routine traverse, the kind known to yachtsmen who play with their boats at sea 'cruising' it is called. Voyaging belongs to seamen, and to the wanderers of the world who cannot, or will not, fit in. If you are contemplating a voyage and you have the means, abandon the venture until your fortunes change. Only then will you know what the sea is all about.

Sterling Hayden

What does a man need - really need? A few pounds of food each day, heat and shelter, six feet to lie down in - and some form of working activity that will yield a sense of accomplishment. That's all - in the material sense, and we know it. But we are brainwashed by our economic system until we end up in a tomb beneath a pyramid of time payments, mortgages, preposterous gadgetry, playthings that divert our attention from the sheer idiocy of the charade. The years thunder by.

Sterling Hayden

To be truly challenging, a voyage, like a life, must rest on a firm foundation of financial unrest.

Sterling Hayden

There's nothing wrong with being an actor, if that's what a man wants. But there's everything wrong with achieving an exalted status simply because one photographs well and is able to handle dialogue".

Sterling Hayden

Top 57 Quotes & Sayings by Sterling Hayden

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