Jack Nicholson Quotes

I would never want to vilify somebody who considered abortion murder. I was an illegitimate child myself. I may not have existed today.

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.

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.

I guess this proves there are as many nuts in the Academy as anywhere else.

Once you've been really bad in a movie, there's a certain kind of fearlessness you develop.

I only take Viagra when I'm with more than one woman.

A lot of people manage to find common ground and not let disagreements or tensions build up and destroy them, and other people break up or get divorced. I don't think anything is ever going to change that situation. You simply try to find an accommodation and an understanding with another person and work from there.

Never rub another mans rhubarb

I'm not hard to get along with.

Once I got started acting I loved it.

I worry from the moment I take a job. I worry about how I'm going to do it, if I can do it ... Then I walk on set and the director says, 'Roll', and all of a sudden, all of it disappears and it's all happening, and I relax, and I'm doing what I do, and I'm not even thinking about it.

There's a period just before you start a movie when you start thinking, I don't know what in the world I'm going to do. It's free-floating anxiety. In my case, though, this is over by lunch the first day of shooting.

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.

My point of view, while extremely cogent, is unpopular ... That the repressive nature of the legalities vis-a-vis drugs are destroying the legal system and corrupting the police system.

I wasn't a babe in the woods. I'd watched a lot of stars, from James Dean to Brando, and I'd seen everybody alive work at MGM. I had a certain old-timer's quality, even though I was young and new, and drew on what I believed before I made it.

I began to think that the finest modern writer was the screen actor. This was in the spirit of the Fifties where a very antiliterary literature was emerging - Kenneth Patchen and others. I kind of believed what Nietzsche said, that nothing not written in your blood is worth reading; it's just more pollution of the airwaves.

Early on, if I was alone two three nights in a row, I'd start writing poems about suicide.

The fuel for the sports fan is the ability to have private theories.

Go sell crazy someplace else; we're all stocked up."
(Melvin Udall aka Jack Nicholson, 1997)

You only lie to two people in your life, your girlfriend and the police.

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.

Even in the most sophisticated person, it is the primitive eye that watches the film.

Just because you're perfectionist doesn't mean you're perfect.

Always try in interviews to avoid the cliches about the problems of public life.

Kids are life's only guaranteed, bona fide upside surprise.

What's beautiful is all that counts, pal. That's all that counts.

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.

Acting is everybody's favorite second job.

I'm the last guy in the world to feel overlooked by the Academy.

Charlize Theron and Cate Blanchett are very good actresses.

There are many directors in the middle range who've made mostly successful pictures, and then there are a few great directors who've had some successes and some failures. I suppose my life would be smoother if I wasn't almost totally enamored of the latter category.

I want a big 25-foot pink statue that holds my grave. Or I also might like the way the Indians did it. They hang you up on the top of a tree and the birds eat you. No, really I would probably choose cremating.

Well, a girlfriend once told me never to fight with anybody you don't love.

Because you know, down deep in my heart, when all is said and done, I still live under the illusion that basically people think of me as an up-and-coming young actor.

You know, I think I understand what you're like now. You're very beautiful and you think men are only interested in you because you're beautiful. But you want them to be interested in you because you're you. The problem is, aside from all that beauty, you're not very interesting. You're rude, you're hostile, you're sullen, you're withdrawn ... oh, I know- you want someone to look past all that at the real person underneath. But the only reason anyone would bother to look past all that is because you're beautful. Ironic, isn't it? In an odd way you're your own problem.

I do pray. I pray to something ... up there. I have a God sense. It's not religious so much as superstitious. It's part of being human, I guess.

Here comes Johnny!

I come from the Lynchs of Sligo. You know, I went there, but I looked in the phone book and there are nine million Lynches in Sligo.

I am a person who is trained to look other people in the eye.

I think the Greeks invented sports as an antidote to philosophy. In sports there are absolute rules. It's not, What about this? What about that? Either you're safe or you're out. It's ten yards or it's not. It's in the hoop or out of the hoop. It's certain.

I respect the social graces enormously. How to pass the food. Don't yell from one room to another. Don't go through a closed door without a knock. Open the doors for the ladies. All these millions of simple household behaviors make for a better life. We can't live in constant rebellion against our parents - it's just silly. I'm very well mannered. It's not an abstract thing. It's a shared language of expectations.

One of my school friends' parents owned a minigolf course, and a bunch of us kids would play there all day in the summer. Two-under deuces was a good score.

I've always fought against being controlled and manipulated and stomped upon by circumstances.

I just like art. I get pure pleasure from it. I have a lot of wonderful paintings, and every time I look at them I see something different.

I assume most of the characters I play are exactly like me.

The most difficult thing about being well known? Getting out of a hotel room at 4am.

I'm certainly not as tough as people think. I'm not a fighter and so forth. I'd just as soon go home.

I like to not care that much about criticism, but I do care about it.

We are going as fast as we can as soon as we can. We're in a race against time, until we run out of money.

Don't look so scared.

I've always thought basketball was the best sport, although it wasn't the sport I was best at. It was just the most fun to watch.

I don't have any plugs or tucks but people do what they want. I look at it as mutilation.

Just let the wardrobe do the acting.

I've always had an urge to feed my need to have fun and feel free. I don't see any interesting alternatives.

The only way to break a bad habit was to replace it with a better habit.

I used to think that one of the great signs of security was the ability to just walk away.

I've spent more time playing golf than anything else the last 18 years. Just wanted to be an 80s-shooter. Got there, too.

Believe it or not, I supported Richard Nixon on the issue of presidential privilege. How could anyone conceive of being the president of the United States and think that every single thing that you say or do can become a part of the public record? It just seems so stupid to me.

I learned a long time ago in Hollywood that the only person I should vote for is myself.

You can't handle the truth!

There's no point dwelling on what might or could have been. You just have to go forward.

A lot of people in the middle of their lives have a secret yearning for more romance.

For an actor, style comes last. You first have to implement the whole thing, but your style comes from the subconscious, which is the best part an actor brings to his work.

I never had a policy about marriage. I got married very young in life and I always think in all relationships, I've always thought that it's counterproductive to have a theory on that.

Everybody's old enough for a beer, ain't that right, Mule?

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.

I'd give my goddamned soul for just a glass of beer.

In other words, I wouldn't like to be an actor if I could only be real. I like to get wild, behaviorally wild, and it's crazy to think of any form where it's just one way.

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.

I have mainly been interested in acting. I think it's a great job, a fine way to live your life.

It always bothered me when people came off stage and were told how great they were. They weren't, really, in my opinion. It was then I started thinking that, contrary to conventional wisdom, film was the artful medium for the actor, not the stage.

Everyone pretty much acknowledges that he's the man, and I still feel that underrates him.

I have a lot of vanity.

Do you think God knew what he was doing when he created woman?

The first role I ever played I had the lead and it's pretty much stayed that way, though people take great relish in calling me a character actor, which I am. There are a lot of short parts I could play, but I only do them when they are central to the idea of the movie.

I've never been able to say I've been influenced by a list of artists I like because I like thousands and thousands and I've been influenced in some way by all of them.

The average celebrity meets, in one year, ten times the amount of people that the average person meets in his entire life.

With comedy, you have to do it right. In a drama, there's a lot of different ways to succeed in a moment. But comedy comes from reality. You can't try to be funny.

There has long been a bemoaning of the lack of opportunity to make films that are anything but explosions or the ladling on the pea soup or whatever you want to call it. You can hardly make a movie where somebody isn't a murderer or a rapist or, if it's a "Fried Green Tomatoes" that isn't some wistful thing on this, that or the other thing.

The less people know about me, the easier my job is.

Have you ever danced with the Devil in the pale moonlight?

The blues and jazz will live forever ... So will the Delta and the Big Easy.

The minute that you're not learning I believe you're dead.

I eat breakfast 300 yards from 4000 Cubans, who are trained to kill me, so don't think for one second that you can come down here, flash your badge and make me nervous.

I have never lied to you, I have always told you some version of the truth.

Decent people shouldn't live here. They'd be happier some place else.

I mean, it's real hard to be free when you're bought and sold in the marketplace.

It's difficult for people sometimes to recognise when they're happy. People sometimes seem to me to be afraid to be happy.

I was invited to join the MGM cartoon department. But if I'd started work in animation I'd have had to take a cut in salary, so I didn't.

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.

I'm the age where we didn't have television as kids. So when I saw my nieces and nephews watching Howdy Doody, Kukla, Fran and Ollie, and so forth, I thought the world had gone mad.

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.

I usually don't get too bogged down with my personal problems because that's a one-way street if you get yourself into a negative frame of mind and only see the dark side of life.

Well, a younger woman is a type, but not necessarily a type for me. And what is a younger woman? I mean, I'm pretty old. Almost everyone is younger.

If you think you're attractive, you're always attractive.

This town needs an enema!

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.

When you look at life retrospectively you rarely regret anything that you did, but you might regret things that you didn't do.

It's a slight stretch of the imagination but most people are alike in most ways so I've never had any trouble identifying with the character that I'm playing.

You make me want to be a better man.