Henry Paulson Quotes

I'd be bored to death if I spent all my time with other businesspeople, bankers and lawyers.

I won't be making any friends in the corporate suites.

When I am working on a movie, all I want to talk about is the movie. All I want to be with are the movie people. It's like a clan. If I'm asked to people's houses for dinner, I hate to go, because they'll talk about other things.

I wish I had stayed and finished my career here in New York.

I have a few celebrity friends, but I'm really not into the whole Hollywood scene. I like to separate myself from my work. It stresses me out if I do too much of the same.

Oh, what a day-to-day business life is.

I didn't go in there and tell them I think you should move me, but I also understand the nature of this business.

If I wasn't the head of a studio, who would talk to me?

You'd be surprised how much easier it is to conduct business over tea than over lunch or dinner in a bustling restaurant.

I was in banking because it was high-paying, intense, a real meritocracy, and the afterwork part was fun, but I found everything to do with banking so boring.

My fear was of being offered a job that would be kind of a full-time position at a veterans organization or even in the government... I'd prefer to not be that, to come up the Beltway every day.

You're isolated as a writer, so I always envied people who could get up early and drive to work and fit into society.

I am afraid I am totally hermetic to social games in general.

When you have friends in the industry, you're always expected to talk about work. Seldom do you talk about stuff outside work with friends in the industry. Therefore, I don't have many actor friends, but I find lot of brotherly warmth from a few.

I don't have many friends in the industry.

It may be that you will be happiest in the rat race; perhaps, like me, you are basically a rat.

Always be nice to everyone in the firm on the way up. You never know who you may meet on the way down.

In every work environment, there will be politics. If you really want to rise to the top, you need to figure out what those politics in your workplace are. Then, you hook it in. You decide what conforms and what does not conform to your personal code.

Being in New York and having worked at Time Out New York and then being at Time, living in New York for a long time has helped because I know everybody. And they're the people who call me and give me jobs. So that kind of real networking, which is just living in a place and having jobs where people around you are extremely successful, has helped me tremendously.

Worship isn't destructive, Martin. I know that. I don't. I only know it's the core of his life. What else has he got? He can hardly read. He knows no physics or engineering to make to world real for him. No paintings to show him how others have enjoyed it. No music except television jingles. No history except tales from a desperate mother. No friends. Not one kid to give him a joke, or make him know himself more moderately. He's a modern citizen for whom society doesn't exist.

I don't know if I want to go to New York. They'll have to pay me a lot more money because I like it here in Kansas City.

I walk a lot in New York, not for the exercise but to get from place to place, and because it's the way of having the least contact with human beings.

Bell Labs Cafeteria, New York, 1943: His high pitched voice already stood out above the general murmur of well-behaved junior executives grooming themselves for promotion within the Bell corporation. Then he was suddenly heard to say: "No, I'm not interested in developing a powerful brain. All I'm after is just a mediocre brain, something like the President of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company."

You don't need a Harvard MBA to know that the bedroom and the boardroom are just two sides of the same ballgame.