“The man upstairs is pushing the buttons, and if your name happens to be on that button, well, thank you.”

The United States is the only country where a driver can have a successful career – either in stock cars or IndyCar – and he won’t need a passport.

I will never say ‘retired’ because that’s such a finality that I don’t want to be part of my life. I’ll work until they throw me in a box.

If you’re so afraid of failure, you will never succeed. You have to take chances.

My wife loves football, but I think she’s resigned to the fact that I’ll never make it there.

Al Unser Sr. was one of the smartest drivers I’ve ever raced against.

Long Beach is the best. I tell everyone that.

I wish we could be 100% shielded from danger, but nothing is in life.

Same with golf: pick up a club. But not many can go out and get in a race car and experience a drive at over 200 miles an hour.

In NASCAR, you can do a lot of banging around and get pretty serious and even get yourself upside down.

If you go off the road, you’re into somebody’s shop-window or front porch.

Motor racing is like one big family, ultimately, and when you come back to it, that’s really what it feels like.

I’ve driven just about every kind of car there is.

I count my blessings every day, quite honestly, because I take nothing for granted.

If the Indy Racing League didn’t have the Indianapolis 500, do you think it would have lasted more than six months? No chance.

It seemed like whenever I got a bona fide offer from Ferrari, I couldn’t do it. And vice versa – when I was ready, their seats were taken.

Every NASCAR driver watches Formula One in the morning; they are well informed.

If the first button of one’s coat is wrongly buttoned, all the rest will be crooked.

On a sea floor that looks like a sandy mud bottom, that at first glance might appear to be sand and mud, when you look closely and sit there as I do for a while and just wait, all sorts of creatures show themselves, with little heads popping out of the sand. It is a metropolis.

Maybe I’ll make a huge color tapestry from my belly button lint.

I would be able to infer, form the shape of that button

After all those years of doing remote detonations, where we just push a button and something explodes, to actually see a nice big fat line of black smoke heading toward something that will blow up is very satisfying.

And he must be allowed the space, the freedom to express himself in the role. Without that space, an actor is no more than an unthinking robot with a chest-full of push-buttons.

Decide that you are no longer be a button that can easily be pushed to react.  

We live in a world where people can ridicule you at the push of the button. They can question you at the push of a button.