Top 108 Quotes & Sayings by Mickey Rourke - Page 2

Winning an Oscar ain't about performance. There's a lot of politics involved.

There's always going to be a war going on inside of me. That's just, I think, my make-up.

I love the first Godfather movie, part one. And two.

I never knew my father, and I'd hate to repeat that kind of cycle with my own children, because I'd also want to be there for them no matter what.

People need medicine and they need therapists.

People are always afraid of the truth.

I used to love playing football in high school. I played with the same guys for 10 years.

The ladies love me and I love the ladies!

In Hollywood, you're always playing roles... It's like going through the motions. But in real life, it's like, you gotta take care of business. It's not just the movies.

I didn't have a childhood, really, because I worked my whole life and... other reasons. So when I had some success, I went ballistic. That was my childhood, and the party kept going on.

Bounty hunters these days - because everything is so sophisticated with computers and surveillance, it doesn't have to be a one-man-army-type guy who goes in and kicks a door down.

I don't care what Tom Cruise says about therapy.

When you lose everything, and I mean everything, you sit there in this empty room in the dark, and the only person who can get you out is you.

I'd just as soon do a big-budget movie as an independent one.

I'm the worst surfer in California. My balance is off from boxing.

Actors should shut up about politics. They tend to be ill-informed finger-pointers who just cosy up to some flavour of-the-month liberal.

Wrestlers are all pretty busted-up by the ends of their careers.

I had gotten injured during the boxing, and I was supposed to take several months off because I'd had a couple of concussions, and so I sort of just left the boxing and got into the acting by accident.

I started having some memory-loss issues. I took a neurological exam, and they said, "Well, you should stop fighting now." And I kept begging them for one more fight, one more fight, and the doctor said to me, "How much are they going to pay you?" I was supposed to fight three more times, and one would have been for a cruiser belt. So I said, "I just need to fight three more times." He said, "Listen, you can't even get hit in the head one more time, your neuro is so bad."

It's always been the case that you have the really rich, and the really poor. But hey, look, all the great empires have their periods where they rule the world, and then they crumble.

People ask me about that all the time. They say, "Did you ever think of directing?" And I say, "It's completely out of the question."

I've been with a lot of women, but who's counting? It's nothing I'm proud of. It's a physical need. Sometimes afterwards I just want to blow my brains out, it's so meaningless.

I couldn't direct traffic. It's hard enough just acting.

In order to understand the stock market we have to realize that, like anything enormous and inert, it's fundamentally stable, and, like anything emotion-driven, it's volatile as hell. Got that? Me neither.

I spent so long studying really hard to become a fine actor, but threw it all away because I got the adulation and the fame so easily

Julian Schnabel painted a picture that he dedicated to my character in Rumble Fish. It was called The Motorcycle Boy. I remember when he brought it over to me at the Mayflower Hotel [in New York] years ago. This is when you and I knew each other.

If you look closely at some scenes in Diner, my eyes look like Dracula's.

The two sports are as different as Ping-Pong and rugby. In boxing, you don’t know what’s going to happen. In wrestling, it’s already prearranged. But the thing I didn’t know about wrestling is that you really get hurt. Because, you know, you’re wrestling in front of a live audience, and you end up doing things like jumps or slams, and 40 percent of the time you don’t land right.

I tried to change my name for the fights, but the only way they could pay me money was if I used my own name. I wanted to change my name to, like, Romeo something-or-other, and they said, "No, we can't do that. We've got to use Mickey Rourke." Because they paid me a lot of money to go over to Europe and Asia to fight.

I get a call, and it's Howard Bingham, and he's got the champ on the line.Muhammad Ali didn't remember me from being a kid, but he was going, "Yeah, you're in bed, and you want your mama with you . . ." It really helped so much. He spent 15 or 20 minutes on the phone with me. That's a memory that I'll always cherish.

When I was like 12 or 13,Muhammad Ali gave me a pair of his trunks that were white satin with gold stripes. They were full of blood, and my mother threw them away. I think it's the first time I ever cursed at my mother.

[The tension] between the Christians and Muslims goes back to the Crusades, doesn't it? It's too easy to blame everything on one guy. These are unpredictable, dangerous times, and I don't think that anyone really knows quite what to do.

When I did Sean Penn’s movie, I think I was living in, like, a $500-a-month room, and someone called me up or bumped into me and asked me if I’d come up to work for a day. That sort of got me going a little bit. But it wasn’t until Sin City [2005] that I kind of got back into the game.

I had achieved so much success in my career and then had this spectacular fall from grace that left me unemployed and living in a town, Los Angeles, that is built on envy. Once you fall, people don't really root for you to come back again. I'd go to restaurants where I always had the best table and half the time they wouldn't even let me pay. And then when I stopped making movies, the same places wouldn't even give me a lousy table, never mind the best one!

Change for me was really hard because I had built myself up to be a certain kind of man my whole life, as men are where I come from. I thought I got to handle things different that's gonna make me feel like a real pussy. For me it was hard to turn the other cheek. Even though it's a stronger choice. It was very hard to make the change, but I had to in order to survive. Otherwise they would have won.

I thought my talent would transcend my outspokenness. I was wrong.

Hey, baby, nobody suffers like the poor.

I'm an old broken down piece of meat and I deserve to be all alone . . .

Since I knew wrestling was all choreographed, I thought, Oh, they don't get hurt at all. But I walked away with a renewed respect for the sport. Because I was very ignorant before - I knew nothing about it.

Women are much stronger than men. When a woman says enough is enough, which means enough is enough. Man will always lie at her feet in the hope of return. I was lying. And somehow happy.

I wanted to change my name to Romeo Florentino. Romeo Florentino - that's a good fighter's name.

I have so many boxing gloves around my house that I would get them confused with other gloves.

All I am hoping for is to be able to work-I think my best work is still ahead of me-I think all that I have been through in the last several years have only made me a better, more interesting actor.

Boxers are very isolated - or isolated within their own camps.

I think the first year and a half that I was in New York I was having trouble just living somewhere. Back in them days the city was a lot different than it is now.

By the end of the shoot [of Wrestler], my trainer was pushing me up three flights of stairs to my house and holding my arm like I was an old cripple. I had three MRIs in the first two months of working on the film. I felt like it really was over by the time we started shooting the movie.

I was very ashamed of seeing a therapist because I thought only crazy people went, and then, after about nine years, I asked him, 'Well, was I really crazy?' And he nodded and said, 'You were but not any more.'

I probably did a dozen plays, like Off-Off-Broadway stuff.