Karl Malden Quotes

(on his early days) "My father was a milkman. So, I delivered milk."

"I`m a workaholic. I love every movie I`ve been in, even the bad ones, every TV series, every play, because I love to work. It`s what keeps me going."

"People have told me that I came to this industry at its Golden Age. But when I was there, it was just an age."

"I am thrilled to be honored by the Screen Actors Guild because I`ve been with it for such a long time. The Screen Actors Guild is sort of a highfalutin name for a union, and this union was always wonderful to work for. For the rank-and-file of the union to honor me is the best compliment I can receive."

I never believed that politics had a place in art, that is to say, not in artistic relationships.

Zera couldn`t stand seeing a guy, like Kazan, do what he did, and therefore, he even took it out on me and Mona. For a couple of years, this is what happened in New York, at that time, it split people who became close.

And then they talk to you about frustration. The first play I was in, Golden Boy, from that play, John Garfield, went to Hollywood, became a big star. Three years went by, and I did another play with another handsome actor, Gregory Peck, who left that play and went to Hollywood, became a big star, and here I am, plowing away, working away, this is years going by.

If you look in those mills, and you do it long enough, you never forget that, that`s there to stay because you feel you`ve being used for, not for what you have here, but what you have in your body, in your muscle. It`s demeaning in a way because you`re a human being.

During that McCarthy period, I was a frightened young man. I was working, but I was frightened.

They asked me how much money I had, and I told them I had saved my every dime from working in the mills, which was about $300. Well, they told me the school tuition for a year was $900. But the man in charge of the school made me an offer I`ll never forget it. He asked me if I was a gambler. He said if I paid the $300, he would take me on and if I worked hard and proved I had talent, somehow he`d find the rest of the tuition money for me.

Working in the mills was hard work, but it was good money, I started out as a laborer making $3.49 a day and later, got moved to an even harder position as a bricklayer that had better pay for $5 a day. And for three long and hard years I wondered to myself if this was where I was going to end up for the rest of my life. Finally, I decided I couldn`t stay.

: I don`t go to the movies. There`s nothing I want to see. My wife will go out with friends to see a movie now and then, but there`s nothing I want to see.

I never thought I was salable. I learned in my second year of drama school that I was not a leading man -- I was a character actor. So I thought, I`d better be the best character actor around.

I have an open-hearth face.