Top 257 Quotes & Sayings by Jack Nicholson - Page 4

I love the company of people. I always have and always will, it comes with my family. But earlier in life I might have got a little nervous if I was alone for a day or two in a row. I might think, "Where are they?" Now, I just go on doing naturally what I do.

I've never lost a friend over work. I come from a small-town environment and I remember my childhood impressions that, if you were a conniver or a fink or whatever, everybody knew about it and you were a louse for the rest of your life. So I never lost those values in some way.

Women are sort of like motorcycle gangs with me. They get really shy and polite. I don't know why.

Never rub another man's rhubarb.

Once you've started a film you don't become a wet noodle. You must have that conflictual interface because you don't know, and they don't know. It's through conflict that you come out with something that might be different, better than either of you thought to begin with.

I mean, it's real hard to be free when you are bought and sold in the marketplace. Of course, don't ever tell anybody that they're not free, 'cause then they're gonna get real busy killin' and maimin' to prove to you that they are. Oh yeah, they're gonna talk to you and talk to you and talk to you about individual freedom. But they see a free individual, it's gonna scare 'em.

Through all permutations and youthful poetry, I came to believe that the film actor was the great "literateur" of his time.

I'm very fortunate in the sense that outside of cohabitating relationships and so forth, I've always got on just as well with women.

Always try in interviews to avoid the cliches about the problems of public life.

I assume most of the characters I play are exactly like me.

I believe in making all movies at their most reasonable. That I get a lot of money as an actor is because nobody else will get it if I don't.

Staying together is a challenge. We all have to accept qualities in other people that aren't always exactly what we want or need.

There's probably no one who understands Method acting better academically than I do, or actually uses it more in his work. But it's funny - nobody really sees that. It's perception versus reality, I suppose.

I'm certainly not as tough as people think. I'm not a fighter and so forth. I'd just as soon go home.

There are many directors in the middle range who've made mostly successful pictures, and then there are a few great directors who've had some successes and some failures. I suppose my life would be smoother if I wasn't almost totally enamored of the latter category.

I'd prefer if people had no impressions of me. As a kid, I had to tell my own family, "Please, just don't talk about me!" Because they always got it wrong. Always. I just didn't want them to tell anyone anything about me.

I'm a scamp. I don't deny it. I like myself.

Many actors will try something different once, but if it isn't a box office success they'll never do it again. In my opinion, there's no point in going on with this job if you do the same thing over and over again.

As an actor, I want to give in to the collaboration with the director because I don't want my work to be all the same. The more this can be done with comfort, the more variety my work has had.

I'm the age where we didn't have television as kids. So when I saw my nieces and nephews watching Howdy Doody, Kukla, Fran and Ollie, and so forth, I thought the world had gone mad.

I began to think that the finest modern writer was the screen actor. This was in the spirit of the Fifties where a very antiliterary literature was emerging - Kenneth Patchen and others. I kind of believed what Nietzsche said, that nothing not written in your blood is worth reading; it's just more pollution of the airwaves.

I have never felt brutalized as an actor. Many actors do, some times, but I've never had that experience. If I'm not happy with the balance, I just won't work with that person again.

I'm in the movie business; it's meant to be very cutthroat. But you won't find anybody that ever says I cheated them or manipulated them.

I goddamn near lost my nose. And I like it. I like breathing through it.

There are major influences on us that people are not aware of. There are big lies that nobody's willing to discuss.

I feel very lucky because I don't think there's any part I can't play. There are parts that scare me more than others.

I have to keep myself in check when I go to the kids' sports events. I sit waaay in the back. I make sure I don't do too much cheering, you know what I mean? I'm still not quite adjusted to this modern school of thought: Oh, it doesn't matter who wins. I'm not all the way there yet, but I accept it from the back row.

How would I like to be seen? Very endearing, charming, intelligent, handsome.

For an actor, style comes last. You first have to implement the whole thing, but your style comes from the subconscious, which is the best part an actor brings to his work.

Kids are life's only guaranteed, bona fide upside surprise.

I guess this proves there are as many nuts in the Academy as anywhere else.

I have mainly been interested in acting. I think it's a great job, a fine way to live your life.

I just know that sameness, repetition, and conceptualizing are the acting craft's adversaries, and it seems more intelligent to start off within a framework where those things are, to some degree, taken out of your hands.

That's what I like about the movie business: you're always in contact with wonderful and interesting people.

The fuel for the sports fan is the ability to have private theories.

I don't play golf competitively. I tell everybody that I cheat so they won't gamble with me. That's why you can't watch football. Everybody's gambling. They don't want to watch the game; they watch the spread.

Liberalism is the right to question without being called a heretic. That's what America did for the world.

When you use a dialect, you worry that the people you're imitating will think you're making fun of them.

There was a period when I just wanted to make what I wanted to make and I didn't care what lie I had to tell.

I would never say, "I'm retired." I believe if I decided to just not work, in six months everybody would just forget whether you were working or not.

I wasn't a babe in the woods. I'd watched a lot of stars, from James Dean to Brando, and I'd seen everybody alive work at MGM. I had a certain old-timer's quality, even though I was young and new, and drew on what I believed before I made it.

I thought of myself as part of the general filmmaking effort. And as my scope broadened, I began to think about directing. I wanted to be the guy who got to say whether the dress is red or blue.

Everybody said I was good, but being known and not having a big film success is almost tougher than being completely new. It just kind of turned my life around and was definitely a highlight.

Freedom in every sense but primarily political sense, a rise in repression that stems from a repression of sexuality. It's AIDS, it's herpes, it's this, it's that. Ask any saloon owner what's happened to social life in America in the past 12 years and they'll tell you it's a different world and these people are strongly misinformed by the media, peer pressure.

As a means of supporting experiential element in film, once I begin to work on a particular movie I consider myself to be the tool of the director.

Everybody's old enough for a beer, ain't that right, Mule?

I have given a name to my pain, and it is Batman.

OK, the director makes the movie. But some movies can't get made without someone like me in them.

I've always understood money; it's not a big mystical thing to me.

I come from the Lynchs of Sligo. You know, I went there, but I looked in the phone book and there are nine million Lynches in Sligo.

The way I reacted to 9/11 was I decided I didn't want to do any movies that are sad or critical. I decided I didn't want to make my living depressing people or making them go home sick, so I just decided I wanted to do comedy for a while and study it for a while. It doesn't mean everybody should do that, but that was my reaction.

If you're going to write, write one poem all your life, let nobody read it, and then burn it. This is very young thinking, I confess, but it is the seminal part of my life.

The most difficult thing about being well known? Getting out of a hotel room at 4am.

Son, we live in a world that has walls and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who's gonna do it? You!?

I do pray. I pray to something...up there. I have a God sense. It's not religious so much as superstitious. It's part of being human, I guess.

He [Castro] is a genius. We spoke about everything.

I did not want to be coming off the stage at the mercy of what somebody else told me I did.

There has long been a bemoaning of the lack of opportunity to make films that are anything but explosions or the ladling on the pea soup or whatever you want to call it. You can hardly make a movie today where somebody isn't a murderer or a rapist or, if it's a "Fried Green Tomatoes" that isn't some wistful thing on this, that or the other thing.

Charlize Theron and Cate Blanchett are very good actresses.

In the real world there's an after-effect of disappointment if you lose an argument. But if, to begin with, you're set up not to have this particular autonomy, then you're not disappointed.