Richard Petty

If guys don’t respect themselves, they don’t respect other people. That’s times and personalities. And all of them are not that way. But it don’t take but one or two to screw up the whole crowd.

No one wants to quit when he’s losing and no one wants to quit when he’s winning.

A lot of them also looked a little further down the line in the future than we did. We always did everything out of Level Cross (N.C.) in the backyard and we were fairly successful with the thing. Then it started being a bigger and bigger business. It started going and bringing more people in, more money, more technology, that kind of stuff. We still sat there in the backyard. By the time we got ready to do something about it, we were so far behind on our money and our engineering and all that stuff it’s just taken us a little time to get going.

I didn’t miss out on a family life because of racing. I had one because of it.

I see two or three cars that are really good, but they’re not dominant. There’s usually somebody who’s got one that’s a little bit better than everybody.

He was going to make it. He had a passion for driving a car … Adam was never interested in anything else.

I’m quite sarcastic, and I’m funny, but not kind of funny. It’s a weird funny, and some people don’t get me, and some people do.

I moved to New York last year and I love it. It’s a huge change and I’ve always wanted to spend time there. It’s like a more intense London, and everything’s up a few notches. The lights are brighter, the pace is faster and the food’s better.

The blues was bleeding the same blood as me.

I think I’m brave about some things and a huge coward in other ways. My fake bravery is talking in front of a bunch of people who might hate it.

The Washington State Supreme Court on Thursday announced a two year suspension for a lawyer caught having jailhouse sex with a triple murder defendant she was representing. Haha! Jokes on you, dummies…I’m not really a lawyer.

Because sex is like boxing, if one of the parties didn’t agree to participate, the other one is committing a crime.

My mother always taught me, even my dad, just never let other people’s opinions of you shape your opinion of yourself. And I never have and I never will.

[On roles resembling the title character in ‘Penelope’] I like this girl because she is a bit of a bad-ass. I grew up watching movies with people like Barbara Stanwyck, and sometimes I get frustrated that there aren’t a lot of great female characters out there that young women can look at and go, ‘I want to be like that’. I go to movies and yell at the women on-screen, ‘Shoot him; just shoot him.’ I mean, why why does the guy always have to shoot him?

I’m my worst critic and I always want to give people something better than I gave them before.

No other formula gives your baby a better start at life except that stuff that comes out of you for free.

[about political pundits suggesting Trump be given a chance to be president] Now, in the broadest sense, I get that impulse: hope for the best in the face of very long odds. It’s like we’re on a plane and we just found out our pilot is a wombat.

This Velvet Mafia thing is just another homophobic, nasty kind of thing that jealous queens make up.

There’s nothing wrong with getting 20 million viewers, but I think there’s something wrong with aiming at getting 20 million viewers, because then you have to take away all the things that will offend, and you’ll end up with something so anodyne that it just washes over you for half an hour. I imagine The Office was also one of the most hated shows on television, that some people passionately hated it. But that’s better, for me. David Bowie said that after Let’s Dance, which is his biggest album ever and obviously not his best, he was doing these stadium gigs and looked out at the audience and suddenly realized that he had Phil Collins fans instead of Iggy Pop fans. And that’s how I feel about everything I do: I want Iggy Pop fans.

There are always generic terms like ‘Americana’, but there are no boundaries as to where it can go.

I’m like one of those firecrackers that goes off in your pocket occasionally. I’m not really struggling with it as much as the people around me. But at least I’m not doing too much damage to anybody or to myself. It’s just the condition I’m aware of.