Top 140 Quotes & Sayings by Sean Penn - Page 2

Whatever one considers art to be, there is in many people a hunger to express themselves creatively and to feel authentic in doing that.

Haiti kind of gets a hold of you.

We've let the blade of our innocence dull over time, and it's only in innocence that you find any kind of magic, any kind of courage.

I've been a road-rat since I got my driver's licence at 16, so I've probably gone across America 20 times.

Hal Holbrook was in one of my first television movies when I was about 18 or 19. He'd made such a strong impression on me and a lasting one in terms of what being an actor was.

Putting something in a movie because it's in the news doesn't make it political to me. If you're not going outside the same old, same old, if you're not pushing the envelope, then you're not doing anything. A good movie is a political thing.

I'm always frustrated when somebody makes a movie out of a book and they leave the book behind, or the heart of it.

I'll tell you what I probably would prefer to happen less and less: actors that I know and respect in shampoo ads. Or modeling.

I can always see light in any situation. It's just the way I'm made.

You're always having to live more to fuel something new. It's an obligation to yourself and to the audience. The personal baggage that comes with being a known actor just adds to that struggle.

Turning one's back on stardom might be the highest form of common sense. One that I would aspire to be more complete with.

I can make a better living as an actor than I can as a director. Though I certainly would prefer to be directing movies.

There is a strength of character in the people who have, by and large, never experienced comfort.

I don't see life as an opportunity to see how far you can go in the pursuit of pain, although I think I've challenged it a bit.

I still think photographers should be lashed out at. They should be put in a cage where you can poke them with a stick for a quarter. But not in a hostile way, just for giggles. They really are on the attack against mankind; it's a disease. They should be helped somewhere. But I'd still like to poke them with a stick.

I get a little scared of words like maturity.

The one thing you can count on in Hollywood - across the board - is cowardice.

A child gets a fever in the United States and it's high enough and sustainable enough, all of us can bring a child to an emergency room. Most Haitians never had that opportunity. They didn't have the emergency room to bring them to. Virtually every time your child has 102 fever, you wait for it to die and you have no clean water to give it.

There is no shame in my saying that we all want to be loved.

I'd do anything to get a performance, short of malice.

Women are the best. The toughest. The bane of my existence. And I'll forever fall for it.

As a foreign worker in Haiti, speaking for myself, speaking for the workers, our organization is about 95 percent Haitian, but even foreign workers driving through, we have had very minimal security issues.

When I go to bed at night and I think of humanity at large, I think of all those things.

The first instinct is love.

I think that it is a good time for those who voted for the ban against gay marriage to sit and reflect and anticipate their great shame and the shame in their grandchildren's eyes if they continue that way of support. We've got to have equal rights for everyone.

I think if you want good things to happen for a country like Haiti, then you need to provide the circumstances where the Haitians can do that.

Reputations are maintained by the outside world, and they're created by it, too, by and large. And they serve as a hell of a device for privacy, because the more people look for something that's not there, the less chance they have of violating who you are. It's like going out there with a mask on, without having to exercise your upper body to put it on.

On a movie, it's always better to stay invisible as much as you can to keep things calm. I like to whisper to my cameraman, I like to whisper to my actors, and whoever else I've gotten to whisper to.

There is a kind of sense of truth and reconciliation that is non-formalized, but it's understood and accepted. Haitians are Haitians and there is an inherent loyalty that forgives an awful lot.

When you get divorced, all the truths that come out, you sit there and go, 'What the f**k was I doing? What was I doing believing that this person was invested in this way?' Which is a fantastically strong humiliation in the best sense. It can make somebody very bitter and very hard and closed off, but I find it does the opposite to me.

In short form I'll say it was an approach to the family and to [author] Jon Krakauer that then led to me seeming to rise to the top of the heap of several filmmakers that were trying to get the rights. And by top of the heap I mean in terms of being somebody that was trusted to do it as they said they were going to attempt to do it and that this way of doing it would be something they would be willing to allow.

There's the old notion that where there's choice, there's chaos, and where there's no choice, there's clarity. If you've got no choice, you've gotta be there, and you've gotta have your heart in it. It leads to a much less self-conscious life.

If you can't count on your heart having some kind of unified response, you can't count on anything. You use your heart as a barometer for your movie's completeness.

When everything gets answered, it's fake.

I'm not going to have a better day, a more magical moment than the first time I heard my daughter giggle.

I do not believe in a simplistic and inflammatory view of good and evil. I believe this is a big world full of men, women, and children who struggle to eat, to love, to work, to protect their families, their beliefs, and their dreams.

I don't read newspapers too much , just because they tend to make me feel I have a political obligation that I think is a distraction from what my political offerings are going to be if I just make my movies.

If there's anything disgusting about the movie business, it's the whoredom of my peers.

That difference do you think you can make, one man in all this madness?

Well, the kind of central question: "Do you want to live - and I don't mean stay alive - do you want to feel your life while you're living it?" You know, there's somewhere to go that was here before we were and is going to be here after us, so get out there in it. It doesn't take somebody who's got some self-important sense of their own attachment to nature to recognise that you're just stupid if you don't go out there.

Venezuela and its revolution will endure under the proven leadership of Vice President Maduro.

Well, it was interesting because when I was going to do it the first time in my head was Leonardo DiCaprio [for Chris] and Marlon Brando was going to play the character that Hal Holbrook eventually played. But then when it wasn't to be and there was no promise that it ever would be I think some part of me didn't want to attach specifics to it anymore - actors or anything else - because I wanted to see it made that much more badly.

A SWAT team surrounded my house and came in every door. But it happened because on the day that we split up, Madonna developed a concern that if she were to return to the house, she would get a very severe haircut.

Rebel is just as bad a word as maturity.

You tolerate me. You really tolerate me!

That was madness. You're never going to bring one of those down with a handgun.

Today, maturity is a word I associate with spirituality. It's one of those words that cause people to change their voice. When your voice gets higher because of what you're saying, there's a problem. To me, the conflict of life is part of the joy of life. There's got to be a recognition of the friction that exists. Maturity seems somehow about getting careful. I don't want to be careful.

Sense of self, and the way one shares it, is perhaps the most valuable and poetic gift in the arsenal of one's life and craft.

If you don’t vote, you don’t matter.

All I need are some tasty waves, a cool buzz, and I'm fine

The advice you give to young directors for sure is to go out and become some version of a successful movie actor. Do that first and say yes to people like Terrence Malick and Clint Eastwood and Woody Allen when they come and offer you movies. It's a great front row seat to filmmaking.

I had a house burn down once, and everything in life burned except my family, and it was so liberating. I didn't have a bad moment about it. It sort of reinvigorated my interest in a lot of things. I wonder if there should be some kind of anarchy.

I'm not going to recommend recklessness but somewhere just short of it - testing yourself and proactively pursuing a rite of passage has become necessary because in western developed countries we've become very comfort-addicted.

You need governance, but you also need a middle class, you need agriculture, they need to be able to export. I think that's probably the biggest issue, the job creation that could come with the kinds of things that Haiti has all the potential in the world to export.

I can tell you that my contribution based on my interpretation of the book is unchanged. The other things, in terms of doing the research and following the trail of it, were probably pretty similar to what I would have done then. I think that what makes me celebrate that it took the 10 years is the various other people and contributors that I ended up having on board.

It's pretty much rock-'n'-roll. I sit down and start feeling stuff and writing.

It's only in innocence you find any kind of magic, any kind of courage.

Well, I'm pretty anti legends - I just don't think they're useful. So that certainly wouldn't be my intention. But will it contribute to that? Sure. Any medicine can be mis-used. But I think that there is a great courage, innocence and magic to him that more than a legend is about connection.

I'm not good at talking to strangers, whether they're sick children or they're - I'm just not good. I'm shy with it.

I don't see myself as a different guy than I was ten years ago. I don't have aspirations to be. It's really about where you're putting your energies. That's changing a lot.