Clint Eastwood Quotations | Page 5

Having the security of being in a series week in, week out gives you great flexibility; you can experience with yourself, try a different scene different ways. If you make a mistake one week, you can look at it and say, 'Well, I won't do that again,' and you're still on the air next week.

There are two kinds of actors -- one sits in a dressing room waiting for his call and the other gets out into the business and polishes his craft by absorbing everything. I don't know enough, I'll never learn everything I need to learn. When a guy thinks he's already learned it, he can only go backwards.

Pose? I don't pose. What am I? Paris Hilton or something?

I couldn't tell you exactly what I like about golf. Just when you think you've got it mastered it lets you know you haven't. I'm just crazy enough to do it.

After directing awhile, you get an instinct about it, but you have to be able to trust your own feelings. Invariably, two-thirds of the way through a film, you say, "Jeezus, is this a pile of crap! What did I ever see in it in the first place?" You have to shut off your brain and forge ahead, because by that time you're getting so brainwashed. Once I commit myself to a film I commit myself to that ending, whatever the motivations and conclusions are.

Today, the only thing Hollywood swears by is space adventures because that's what goes over well. For my part, I trust my instinct and I make the films I believe in. If the public follows me, that's wonderful. If it doesn't follow, "c'est la vie.

I'm more focused on making a scene seem real as opposed to perfect.

Hollywood seems to succumb to fads. Well, action films do well. Give me violence. Give me a scene where there's a couple of car chases or shooting and stuff like that. They're forgetting the fact that there's a basic structure to a story that is essential to making it really broad and appealing.

I don't see myself as conservative, but I'm not ultra-leftist. You build a philosophy of your own. I like the libertarian view, which is to leave everyone alone. Even as a kid, I was annoyed by people who wanted to tell everyone how to live.

You know I've had people come up and ask me to sign their guns. Sign my name on gun handles and holsters and stuff. I've done it once or twice for law enforcement officials, but when people do that -- and there have been quite a few of them lately -- I always tell them no. I don't want to do that. I don't want my name on that and I hope you use this gun, whatever its purpose is, I hope it's used wisely.

People have lost their sense of humor. In former times, we constantly made jokes about different races.

I'm suffering from oxygen deprivation. It's overwhelming watching your career go by.

Kids piercing themselves, piercing their tongues, what kind of masochism is that? Is it to show you can just take it?

Most people who'll remember me, if at all, will remember me as an action guy, which is okay. There's nothing wrong with that. But there will be a certain group which will remember me for the other films, the ones where I took a few chances. At least, I like to think so.

My father died very suddenly at sixty-three. Just dropped dead. For a long time afterward, I'd ask myself, Why didn't I ask him to play golf more? Why didn't I spend more time with him? But when you're off trying to get the brass ring, you forget and overlook those little things. It gives you a certain amount of regret later on, but there's nothing you can do about it. So you just forge on.

There's really no way to teach you how to act, but there is a way to teach you how to teach yourself to act. That's kind of what it is; once you learn the little tricks that work for you, pretty soon you find yourself doing that.

You take the work seriously, you don't take yourself seriously. You keep that straight and you'll do well the rest of your life.

Keep your eyes on the horizon and your nose to the wind.

When I look back on my life, I don't have regrets about what I didn't do. If I'd become a musician, it could have ruined my life.

An awful lot of good movies have gone unrecognized, and an awful lot of bad movies have had tremendous recognition. As long as you keep that in mind, you are never really disappointed.

Things always look different from higher up.

None of the pictures I take a risk in cost a lot, so it doesn't take much for them to turn a profit. We don't deal in big budgets. We know what we want and we shoot it and we don't waste anything. I never understand these films that cost twenty, thirty million dollars when they could be made for half that. Maybe it's because no one cares. We care.

A man's just gotta know his limits

Participating in a gun buy-back program because you think that criminals have too many guns is like having yourself castrated because you think your neighbors have too many kids.

This film cost $31 million. With that kind of money I could have invaded some country.

I know what you're thinking, punk. He just threw three straight split-fingered fastballs at the knees. Does he have any left? Well, to tell you the truth in all the excitement, I kind of lost track myself...

I'm not really a Hollywood person. Not that I don't like L.A., but I'm just a Northern California guy.

I want the troops from Great Britain and the U.S. to be successful, but by the same token, Afghanistan has always been a screw-up.

I just thought, 'Yeah, this gal would be great, if we can get her trained up, if we can get a little bit more bulk on her, to make her look like a fighter,' ... She was like a feather. But what happened is, she had this great work ethic.

The U.S. military was segregated 'til the Korean War, and the blacks in World War Two were totally segregated.

The clock's ticking, Pops, and I'm only getting older.

You've got to ask yourself one question: 'Do I feel lucky?' Well, do ya punk?

It was sort of the beginning of celebrity in a way. They felt the heroes were all the people who died over there. They felt terrible about being singled out.