Sean Penn Quotes

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.

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.

Oh, I’m a big-mouth. I said a lot of things.

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

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

The thing that’s very close in the process is writing and acting, not directing. Directing’s very different.

There are a few directors around who I have some excitement about spending my $7 at the theatre watching their movies.

Love is a mess, at best, and I figure it can be very real in spite of all the things people try to attach to it.

I love acting, truly my favorite people are actors.

There is no re-inventing the wheel.

The bottom line is, you love your wife, you do your best with that.

When I was growing up and somebody like Robert De Niro had a movie come out, it was a cultural event. Because he had such a confidence and a single mission that was so intimate.

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.

I’m not a breakfast eater.

I like to believe that love is a reciprocal thing, that it can’t really be felt, truly, by one.

In my teens, I fell in love with the movies.

In between, I go broke because I seem to do movies where you’re not paid a lot as an actor.

I cannot tell you that I ever fell in love with the theater as an audience. I fell in love with the theater as an actor for a period of time, but I have struggled as an audience, and I struggle more now than then. I was always a movie guy.

On any movie I’m involved with, I say what I think.

I choose movies that I think will speak to what’s important.

At this stage, what would be rewarding would be for audiences to want to watch.

There is no shame in my saying that we all want to be loved by someone. As I look back over my life in romance, I don’t feel I’ve ever had that.

I’ve always operated under the notion that audiences don’t always know when they’re being lied to, but that they always know when they’re being told the truth.

I’m a huge Woody Allen fan. Good movie, bad movie, it doesn’t matter – I just like his movies.

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.

‘The Indian Runner‘ was easy. It had been incubating in me for eight years, and by the time I sat down to write the thing, I had all the pictures in my head.

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.

So if we have anything original to offer, it’s to speak from our own life about the society we’re in.

If you’re willing to put two thoughts into a picture then you’re already ahead of the game.

I’ve never really been one to get what they call stage fright so much.

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.

When I buy a Nikon camera, I have no tolerance for the instructions. I’m ready to make some mistakes using it and get some bad pictures back until I’ve figured it out for myself.

Sacrificing American soldiers or innocent civilians in an unprecedented preemptive attack on a separate sovereign nation may well prove itself a most temporary medicine.

Well, I think that when you direct a movie or write it. And in the case of the two movies I did, I wrote and directed, they occupy a special place for you.

Yeah, I had actually tried to stop acting before I made Dead Man Walking.

That on a romantic level, if you feel it about somebody and it’s pure, it means that they do too.

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

I am a limousine liberal.

I live in the energy and rhythm of the character. To some degree, that’s true of every actor I’ve worked with.

Well, look at all of these summer blockbusters. You can’t help but laugh a little, because you’ve already seen a lot of these movies 482 times.