Sean Penn Quotations

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

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

Anger can be a problem, but it has tremendous potential, too. It's just figuring out what to do with it.

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.

There's a lot of mediocrity being celebrated, and a lot of wonderful stuff being ignored or discouraged.

In school, I was a genius of the year preceding the year I was in, every year.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

My favorite thing to do is not act - it's that simple.

I think we all have light and dark inside us.

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

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

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

Yeah, I had a tremendous time shooting in Nebraska. I like that state a lot, all over it.

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.

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

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

Child-rearing is my main interest now. I'm a hands-on father.

Marriage ain't easy, but it's great most of the time.

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

I don't consider myself specifically political, you know? I think of working as an actor as being a human thing. The concerns I have that fall into politics are human concerns.

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.

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.

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

I think it's much more important to direct movies but if it's going to take five years between each one then I'll have to make up for that.

There are some cigarette burns in some funny places.

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

These are the rare directors who come along, and you're lucky if you stumble across one as an actor.

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.

Family makes me feel there's a reason I'm alive... I'm feeling my life, which I didn't always do partly because I'd be drunk a lot.

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.

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.

tearing oneself apart for the amusement of the audience.

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

If I win the lottery, I'm gonna direct three to four pictures every four to five years, instead of one - and there won't be time to act.

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.

It varies from role to role and the type of the piece and the people you're working with. All those factors contribute to how you function on a movie.

It's human to want to get your hands in it.

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

I love stories about people who are smart enough to know that what they're doing is destroying them, but that knowing that doesn't help them.

Somewhere along the line, the actions of this government are the actions of me.

'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.

It's a tough story, but I think it has a lot more than grimness to offer...it's what we are experiencing in our lifetime.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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 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

If you don’t vote, you don’t matter.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

When everything gets answered, it's fake.

I think life's an irrational obsession.

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 really love to make movies.

I think you start to prepare the minute you read something.

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

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.

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.

I'm not a breakfast eater.

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

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

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

I don't have any particular excitement about working with any specific director or actor at this point.

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

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

I lost a friend I was blessed to have. My thoughts are with the family of President Chavez and the people of Venezuela.

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

One of the reasons people sell out so quickly is because even the talented think they're frauds. It's a culture that doesn't encourage people to believe in the work they do. You're told to second-guess yourself all the time. That's where I think a little hostility and arrogance can save you. And I've never been lacking for either.

There is no re-inventing the wheel.

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.

A clearer and more conventional narrative would have helped the film without, in my opinion, lessening its beauty and its impact. Frankly, I'm still trying to figure out what I'm doing there and what I was supposed to add in that context! What's more, Terry himself never managed to explain it to me clearly.

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

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.

You try to do your best at what you're getting paid for.

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

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 think that I've still not been successful at playing the role of the retired actor, and I'd like to work on that.

I love acting, truly my favorite people are actors.

I just want real creative freedom without worrying about, you know, car payments.

I am a Justin Timberlake fan.

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

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.

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

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

It has nothing to do with the emotional demands of a role; I've done comedies that are as draining to me as any drama.

The major studios are by and large banks, and they give you what is by and large a loan to make a movie. Like banks, they want their money back plus.