Sean Penn
In school, I was a genius of the year preceding the year I was in, every year.
Selling a movie feels like a hustle to every bone in my body. Many actors have careers dominated by modeling. They're all over the place. It turns me off. People who are good at what they do ought to practice something bigger.
I choose movies that I think will speak to what's important.
Craft comes into acting later rather than sooner. I was somebody who had to learn through a process - a natural actor doesn't need to.
I live in the energy and rhythm of the character. To some degree, that's true of every actor I've worked with.
When you act in a film, you're inevitably surrounded by people you didn't choose, right down to the set painter. I like being able to pick the family I'm waking up to in the morning that's going to make this group effort to tell a story that applies to what's interesting to me at that stage in my life.
A lot of critics sometimes get into analyzing the way actors direct versus non-actors directing. And they really always miss it. It's one of those things where, by not being practitioners, they just came up with something that made sense to them.
The thing that's very close in the process is writing and acting, not directing. Directing's very different.
I consider myself fortunate that in my home, acting or the creative arts were a good option. This was a respected tour of duty in my family. Acting wasn't something that was left to tragic bohemians. But we weren't a family that obsessed on cinema.
It's only in innocence you find any kind of magic, any kind of courage.Collection: Magic
I'm not going to have a better day, a more magical moment than the first time I heard my daughter giggle.Collection: Daughter
There is no shame in my saying that we all want to be loved.Collection: Want
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.Collection: Self
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.Collection: Dream
If you don’t vote, you don’t matter.Collection: Matter
When everything gets answered, it's fake.Collection: Fake
All I need are some tasty waves, a cool buzz, and I'm fineCollection: Money
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.Collection: Heart
I get a little scared of words like maturity.Collection: Maturity
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.Collection: Eye
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.Collection: Thinking
If there's anything disgusting about the movie business, it's the whoredom of my peers.Collection: Sarcastic
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.Collection: Country
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.Collection: Mean
That difference do you think you can make, one man in all this madness?Collection: Men
Women are the best. The toughest. The bane of my existence. And I'll forever fall for it.Collection: Fall
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.Collection: Team
I'd do anything to get a performance, short of malice.Collection: Malice
It's pretty much rock-'n'-roll. I sit down and start feeling stuff and writing.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Stupid
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.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Calm
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.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Photography
Venezuela and its revolution will endure under the proven leadership of Vice President Maduro.Collection: President
The one thing you can count on in Hollywood - across the board - is cowardice.Collection: Hollywood
Rebel is just as bad a word as maturity.Collection: Maturity
The first instinct is love.Collection: Instinct
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.Collection: Successful
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.Collection: Book
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.Collection: Heart
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.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Pain
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.Collection: Loyalty
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.Collection: Country
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.Collection: Jobs
That was madness. You're never going to bring one of those down with a handgun.Collection: Life
You tolerate me. You really tolerate me!Collection: Tolerate
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.Collection: Maturity