Racing is life. Anything before or after is just waiting.
– Steve McQueen
I’m not sure that acting is something for a grown man to be doing.
– Steve McQueen
I’m not sure whether I’m an actor who races or a racer who acts.
– Steve McQueen
My influences come from real life. I’m not interested in cinema for cinema’s sake. I’m interested in life – what one does and how one interacts.
– Steve McQueen
I’m not a great actor – let’s face it. I don’t have a great deal of scope. There are certain things I can do, but when I’m bad, I stink.
– Steve McQueen
I don’t believe in that phony hero stuff.
– Steve McQueen
I learned that life is a long and difficult road, but you have to keep going, or you’ll fall by the wayside.
– Steve McQueen
Film is important; it can be more than reportage or a novel – it creates images people have never seen before, never imagined they’d see, maybe because they needed someone else to imagine them.
– Steve McQueen
If I hadn’t made it as an actor, I might have wound up a hood.
– Steve McQueen
I’m about challenging people. Like, properly challenging them and their assumptions.
– Steve McQueen
I live for myself and I answer to nobody.
– Steve McQueen
When I did The Great Escape, I kept thinking, “If they were making a movie of my life, that’s what they’d call it – the great escape.”
– Steve McQueen
I just want the brass ring and the pine trees and my kids and the green grass. I want to get rich and fat and watch my kids grow.
– Steve McQueen
I’ll never be as good an actor as I want to be. But I’ll be good.
– Steve McQueen
Stardom equals financial success and financial success equals security. I’ve spent too much of my life feeling insecure. I still have nightmares about being poor, of everything I own just vanishing away. Stardom means that can’t happen.
– Steve McQueen
Look, Chalmers, let’s understand each other… I don’t like you.
– Steve McQueen, Bullitt, 1968
Sometimes you have to say goodbye to the things you know and hello to the things you don’t.
– Steve McQueen, The Reivers, 1969
There’s something about my shaggy dog eyes that makes people think I’m good. I’m not all that good.
– Steve McQueen
The Navajos have a saying they live by: “A land where there is time enough and room enough.” I want that, too.
– Steve McQueen
I’m out of the Midwest. It was a good place to come from. It gives you a sense of right or wrong and fairness, which I think is lacking in our society.
– Steve McQueen
When I believe in something, I fight like hell for it.
– Steve McQueen
I would rather wake up in the middle of nowhere than in any city on earth.
– Steve McQueen
I’m certainly not who people think I am. I always do whatever I want to do, and my films are personal to me.
– Steve McQueen
I really don’t like to act. At the beginning, back in ’51, I had to force myself to stick with it. I was real uncomfortable, real uncomfortable.
– Steve McQueen