Tony Curtis Quotes

While you're doing it, you don't really know what you're doing.

I've always believed that service to others is rent we pay for our time on this planet.

I look at everything in an artistic way.

My whole world before I joined the Navy was my neighborhood in the Bronx.

I wouldn't be caught dead marrying a woman old enough to be my wife.

If you don't know your gift, you've got no lift.

Like an opera singer, I am able to sing out my song in paint.

Women are beginning to lose their identity. They have jumped with teeth clenched, fists braced and eyes aglow, into the competitive man's world. They're losing the vibrant quality of femininity, the aura of mystery.

Jack Lemmon is my best friend and he's a very wonderful actor. A very talented, very funny man. A lovely man. We're like brothers! We are gifts to each other. He's such a fun personality. There will only ever be one Jack Lemmon.

I was born in and worked in a period that could be called enviable.

Painting is much more than therapy to me its a way of life.

Even on a personal note, my dressing table downstairs is crowded with things, like a mini landscape. It's a city with buildings and towers and roads. There's a pool and a little park. When I move something around it becomes a different tableau.

I want the public to know that it will be an honor for me to meet them and spend a few special moments with all those who helped me through my filmed career.

You wanna know the secret of life? The saliva of young girls.

We often don't think of them, we think of the great wars and the great battles, but what about losing a son or a daughter, or a girl losing her husband or vice versa? I think of the people who never got the chance to have the opportunities I had.

I used to be good friends with my depression, saying oh I'm so depressed, or life is terrible.

Its not age as much as the experiences I have had.

It is for the latter that I always wanted to be an actor: to play characters who are always on the move.

If you know how to live in Vegas you can have the best time.

Every movie I've been in has ended up on television.

I will always remember this summer day in Paris, when I was to perform a great acrobatic move. I can still see myself stepping on the ring of a packed circus along real performers.

It's such a human condition, whether you're a great track star or a great knitting person or you paint watercolors - someone knows who you are.

I enlisted when I was a boy. The Navy looked after me like my mother. It fed me, took care of me and gave me wonderful opportunities.

I like Vegas for its spontaneity.

Art is an emotional experience

I don't know what organically grown chickens are; I've never seen one.

I enjoy being recognized whatever environment I'm in.

I joined the Navy hoping to be submariner and ended up in the sub service aboard a tender in the Pacific.

My parents were Hungarian immigrants; my father was a tailor and we lived in the back of a tailor store. And that was my first inkling of what it was like to be raised in America. It had a profound effect on me - I saw different people coming in all the time with different attitudes and I liked it. And as I grew older, I found that I was able to use something inside of me to get some sympathy if I wanted it. I used to shine shoes, and I would use a waif-like look. I'd get a dime and I'd be as happy as could be.

Everywhere I go in the world, people know me and recognise me and really show affection for me.

I feel strongly that we, all of us, are brothers and sisters, and nothing interferes with that except our education, our background, where we grew up and how we should do it. If you eliminated all those negatives and gave us an open view of what life would be like, it would be different.

They gave me away as a prize once - a Win Tony Curtis For A Weekend competition. The woman who won was disappointed. She'd hoped for second prize - a new stove.

Now I'm a painter. That was another opportunity I was able to pursue, I've been painting all my life, now it's become a second career because of my success in the movies.

I can't sit around and wait for the telephone to ring.

My life is very full; my wife makes it so. I'm 82 years old and I'm having the best time I've ever had in my life. I want to share that with all of you. Find a way to do that, find a way to be at peace with yourself, to enjoy the little things in life. Make them your own.

Hollywood ... the most sensational merry-go-around ever built.

I'm world famous, everywhere I go there are people who love me because of I've been able to bring them some joy from the movies I've made.

The movie business is very twisted, out of site, out of mind, you know.

I've been in the movies for 50 years, I've made 130 some-odd movies.

But my longevity is due to my good timing.

When I was in bed with Marilyn Monroe, I was never sure before, during or after, where her mind was.

But where there is no art show, I would still be painting.

Marilyn Monro wasn't the brightest person in the world - that didn't make a difference one way or the other - but she was giving and kind. And that's what got her in trouble. She was so giving and kind to all of these people she met that she found herself doing these things that she didn't want to do.

Every line, everything you do in life, should have a motive and a reason. Every one of us should have a motive and a reason, most of the time, to accomplish all the things that we want in life.

I was a handsome boy, a very handsome young man, bright blue eyes, mmm. I would make trucks skid off the road. Anyway, girls were never a problem; the problem was me. But a lot of guys didn't like me because I made it look so easy, but it wasn't easy for me or anybody. When you're 24, it's not easy. You haven't reached anywhere that you want to be, so my looks helped me get in the movies, and I'm privileged that my parents came up with what I look like. What they did I'll never know and I don't care.

On kissing Marilyn Monroe: It's like kissing Hitler.

At 17, I dreamed of seeing the world. At 19, I had been around the world and back.

That so many people respond to me is fabulous. It is like having a kind of Alzheimer's disease, where everyone knows you and you don't know anyone.

The service meant so much to me. You don't know privileged I feel and how lucky I am to have served.

Burt Lancaster was a very powerful and intriguing person. That essence of what he was, is the very thing that you and I see on the screen when we watch him.