Jack Nicholson
I love writing, but I stopped because I felt I was more effective approaching filmmaking from a different vantage point.Collection: Writing
Million bucks won't see you through a major health crisis.Collection: Bucks
It's the post-literate generation that is most disturbing to a movie-maker. The explosions and the knifings. People like to go to what's hot and you can't get past a certain gross unless you involve children who go more than once.Collection: Children
I look for a director with a script he likes a lot, but I'm probably after the directors more than anything.Collection: Directors
It [TV] is the cancer of film. It's why people can't be educated to film. In the late '60s, we expected to see a movie or two every week and be stimulated, excited and inspired. And we did. Every week after week. Antonioni, Goddard, Truffaut - this endless list of people. And then comes television and home video. I know how to work exactly for the big screen, but it doesn't matter what I think about the art of movie-making versus TV.Collection: Art
I don't believe in God now. I can still work up an envy for someone who has a faith. I can see how that could be a deeply soothing experience.Collection: Believe
I don't believe that relationships are fixed things. People are necessarily complex and confused beings. We don't always do the right thing, say the right, and behave the same way or the way we always want to behave.Collection: Confused
I take responsibility for my successes as well as my failures. But when I look at my professional mistakes, I'm always left with the feeling that maybe I should have done more.Collection: Mistake
Because of the way the business is structured, I have sometimes turned down scripts that I might otherwise have accepted had I known who was directing them.Collection: Might
You have to do every movie one at a time. Trilogy is contrary to this ideology. My nightmare is to wake up and find myself the host of a TV series.Collection: Wake Up
I envy people of faith. I'm incapable of believing in anything supernatural.Collection: Believe
Life doesn't have to be about finding Osama bin Laden or becoming the president of the United States. Life is about the little things, which is one of the things you learn when you get older.Collection: Life
Time keeps no measure when true friends are parted, No record day by day; the sands move not for those who, loyal-hearted, friendship's firm laws obey.Collection: Friendship
I am a person who is trained to look other people in the eye. But I can't look into the eyes of everyone who wants to look into mine; I can't emotionally cope with that kind of volume. Sunglasses are part of my armor.Collection: Eye
You are more thoughtful because you don't act as quickly anymore. When I turned 70 it was the first time I felt young for my age. Fifty dropped on me like a ton of bricks - there is something about that number - but when 70 came along I felt good about it.Collection: Thoughtful
I'd give my goddamned soul for just a glass of beer.Collection: Beer
I don't know if this is a true statistic, but I heard somewhere that there are three times as many single women over forty as single men. That's what we got from the women's movement. The chickens have come home to roost.Collection: Home
Everyone pretty much acknowledges that he's the man, and I still feel that underrates him.Collection: Men
I think the Greeks invented sports as an antidote to philosophy.Collection: Sports
You can call me Joker. And as you can see, I'm a lot happier.Collection: Batman Movie
Even in the most sophisticated person, it is the primitive eye that watches the film.Collection: Eye
Take caution in your tone, commander. I'm a fair man, but this -- heat is making me absolutely crazy.Collection: Crazy
You make me want to be a better man.Collection: Love
I want my kids to have a deep, inner feeling that it's alright to be happy, that you don't have to be constantly manufacturing problems that you don't really have.Collection: Kids
If it is difficult to know yourself as an individual, it seems to be more complex as a couple. So if you say, "Oh I like a person who is like this and that," you might take away the possibility of seeing the only one that might be right for you.Collection: Couple
I didn't know that my sister was really my mother until I was thirty-seven years old. But life has taught me that there have been a lot of things that I didn't know.Collection: Mother
I would never want to vilify somebody who considered abortion murder. I was an illegitimate child myself. I may not have existed today.Collection: Children
There is one thing I know about creative conflict: once my argument is exhausted, I am not going to be unhappy whether it moves in my direction or away.Collection: Moving
I think it's good if a man gives a woman some time to herself because I think we all need that and we can all benefit from that. It doesn't imply a rejection of the other person, just a sense that because we do have our separate identities, sometimes you have to be less involved in another person's life or need to have that other person be less involved in your life.Collection: Men
Dissembling is a common tool of the anger junkie.Collection: Tools
A lot of people in the middle of their lives have a secret yearning for more romance.Collection: People
This town needs an enema!Collection: Needs
I have mainly been interested in acting. I think it's a great job, a fine way to live your life.Collection: Jobs
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.Collection: Reality
Always try in interviews to avoid the cliches about the problems of public life.Collection: Trying
I'm certainly not as tough as people think. I'm not a fighter and so forth. I'd just as soon go home.Collection: Home
Women are sort of like motorcycle gangs with me. They get really shy and polite. I don't know why.Collection: Motorcycle Gangs
I assume most of the characters I play are exactly like me.Collection: Character
Staying together is a challenge. We all have to accept qualities in other people that aren't always exactly what we want or need.Collection: People
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.Collection: Wells
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.Collection: Different
Through all permutations and youthful poetry, I came to believe that the film actor was the great "literateur" of his time.Collection: Believe
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.Collection: Believe
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.Collection: Mean
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.Collection: Real
I've always understood money; it's not a big mystical thing to me.Collection: Bigs
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.Collection: Depressing
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.Collection: Cheated
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.Collection: Sports