John Malkovich Quotes

As an actor there are no drawbacks.

It's a little bit hard to have personal things subject to public scrutiny, and it's a pressure that other people aren't under, but then they're under a lot of pressures that we're not under.

One doesn't know if one had a happy childhood or not. I don't really know what it means.

I find it hard to pre-plan every element of everything I do. It's not my thing.

I'd hate to see any film I'm involved in fail, especially artistically but also business-wise.

The world is ruled by violence, or at least the imminent threat of violence. It always has been.

I brought my first fall/winter line to New York, and it was confiscated by U.S. Customs. They asked, 'What is the value of this?' I said, 'I'm not so good with existential questions.'

I like design, I like details, to me it is just another form of self-expression.

The most evocative thing to me is probably when a writer and a group of performers can collectively put together something compelling that asks the really simple question: 'How do we live?'

I don't like things too overstated in the cut or too perfect.

I wouldn't say anything I ever did in film would be something I'd use the word proud about. I've done better work in the theater.

Things are so much global and Americanised.

I like to direct movies, but I don't like to goof around for eight years talking about it.

I haven't physically attacked anyone in a couple of years.

I was a very good baseball and football player, but my father always told me I was much more interested in how I looked playing baseball or football than in actually playing. There's great truth in that.

With acting it's your neck up there in the end. And if you think the director can't help you it's one thing. But if you feel they're reining you in when they need to be giving you some rope, or vice versa, then I just don't tolerate that.

It's not a gift of mine, but one given to me, to be able to criticise myself and not be crushed, by myself or by others.

The theater is so disappointing, really, that it's hard to go again and again. It's just too heartbreaking. I'd rather watch football or play a game or read.

I grew tired of religion some time not long after birth. I believe in people, I believe in humans, I believe in a car, but I don't believe something I can't have absolutely no evidence of for millenniums. And it's funny, people think analysis or psychiatry is mad, and they go to church ...

And if you say a word about this over the radio, the next wings you see will belong to the flies buzzing over your rotting corpse.

I think when I went to psychoanalysis, I actually believed that people said what they meant. This was my whole problem.

I'm supposed to be a pretty good theater actor.

All you have is the writer's imagination. You have a very limited time to take this imaginary person and bring the details of their life, as you perceive them, to life. You attempt to do to that as fully and as vibrantly as you can. It's depressing to read how much you've failed. And it's not even particularly instructive or necessary to read how you succeeded because in the end don't you have to judge that?

I have driven school buses, sold egg rolls and painted houses, and I have often wondered what my life would have been like if I hadn't gone into acting. Mind you, it's a great life, going around pretending you're other people and getting paid ridiculous sums of money for it.

You have to do things people see or you don't get to do anything.

I was never a fanatical movie person.

I have at times spoken with my peers and the head of the actors' union about why we're not paid when we appear in, say, a 'TMZ' production, but there seems to be no real interest in combatting it.

Well, I design costumes because I started with the theater in Chicago, but somehow a few lines just sort of fell to me to do it. And I studied it in school and I always liked it.

I'm a little bit phobic about stains on my clothes, so I never travel without a little packet of organic stain remover.

If you don't interfere with me, I'll always do something really good.

There will be people who hate everything you do. And some people will really love it. But that's not really different from the people who really hate it.

I've always been an avid reader. Everyone in my family read a lot. Considering we were from a little town, we were pretty literate.

I wasn't really raised to be the type of person to have doubts.

'Secretariat' was such a magnificent animal, unbelievably beautiful and powerful. It's always nice to see something that close to perfection, a reason to celebrate.

Where women are concerned, the rule is never to go out with anyone better dressed than you.

I still have a temper, I suppose.

I can have incredible self-discipline. But see, I think it's obviously a form of stupidity.

I go around the world, working with all kinds of people who I love.

It's tough to figure out how do we compete in Europe and North America, when obviously a living wage for us is very different than a living wage in Indonesia.

Nothing you do particularly matters. But I'm not sure that's a great excuse for doing it poorly.

There are many, many benefits to being known for whatever it is you do. To deny that would be sort of asinine and vulgar.

I don't remember my life before I had children.

I think probably when I was little, after my brother turned on me, I just had to play by myself or with myself. I've always done that. I think either it's some kind of weirdly competitive streak or it takes my mind off whatever's bothering me.

I don't mind tracksuits. At the track.

We have a tendency to think everyone's idiotic and everyone's only doing something idiotic, and the world is controlled by a not-so-secret group of morons. There's great truth in that, I suppose, but then it's also not true.

A dog that has rabies probably will do things it wouldn't do if it didn't have rabies. But that doesn't change the fact that it has rabies.

My father was a very contradictory man.

Most films, it doesn't matter if you see them or not.

I don't throw things or yell.

You can't work in the movies. Movies are all about lighting. Very few filmmakers will concentrate on the story. You get very little rehearsal time, so anything you do onscreen is a kind of speed painting.

I've permitted myself to learn and to fail with some regularity. And that is probably the one thing I was given, and that I'm still grateful for.

I believe in humans.

I admire sensible, kind people. They're not often famous.

There's a reason screens are only this thick.

I prefer to conduct my life based on how I treat people.

You can't take a play someone has directed and do whatever you want with it.

I always liked clothes; since I was very, very young, I was interested. I studied costume as part of my theatre education.

I can see how, given a certain degree of sensitivities, proclivities and rage, I could have ended up differently.

If I had spent as much time in the weight room as I did designing football uniforms, I probably would have had a free college education.

Theater is so ephemeral, and I love that.

I only have two rules for my newly born daughter: she will dress well and never have sex.

I probably have more female friends than any man I've ever met. What I like about them is that almost always they're generally mentally tougher, and they're better listeners, and they're more capable of surviving things. And most of the women that I like have a haunted quality - they're sort of like women who live in a haunted house all by themselves.

I don't wake up drenched in sweat because I haven't been on stage in years.

I don't really have a comprehension of being a public figure.

I just start with a pencil and paper. I don't want something too trendy, too fashion-forward. I don't want to make something I consider a regular person couldn't wear with blue jeans. But I don't want to make something that other people make, either - like a skinny black suit in a shiny material that you can buy anywhere.

I don't lose my temper very often now, and if I do, it's well deserved.

And may the best of you - for it will only be the best of you, and even then only in the rarest and briefest moments - succeed in framing that most basic of questions, 'how do we live?'

Some people die before their time so that others can live. It's a cornerstone of civilization.

I mean, a lot of time rehearsals are taken up with other things other than preparing a character.

Most of the women that I like have a haunted quality - they're sort of like women who live in a haunted house by themselves.

Every country has their problems.

I think I was born at a time when an American male had so many advantages and opportunities that weren't available to men before or after, just a very brief period.

When you think of how history is revealed, we know certain things to be facts at certain periods of time, which turn out not to be so factual as time marches on.

I'm a little bit of a fabric lunatic.

I'll never be the biggest kind of star; I'll be like Bob Duvall, respected as an actor but a lot of people can't identify the face. I don't have the personality of a big star, or the looks of a Mel Gibson or a Paul Newman, or the style of a George C. Scott.

I love Chicago, but in a lot of ways it's a disappointment. You can work there for years and years, and because you're in Chicago, you don't get the recognition. It has some of the best theater in the country, but when they shoot a movie there, they bring in all their actors.

I don't care what other people think. I don't think it matters.

Actors generally get to do things you probably shouldn't do in real life - well, at least as much as one might like to or be tempted to. Though I suppose a lot of actors just go ahead and do it, don't they?

I mean, anything that money can be made off will never be a problem to make, no matter what it is.

Reviews are destructive by their very nature.

I know for a fact that a lot of actors are desperate and unhappy if their careers are not progressing at what they think is the correct rate. They just go crazy if they're not working. I don't feel I'd be that way. You can always get a few people together and put on a play. Maybe not in New York or L.A., but in a lot of other towns, you can.

I'm not a very skeptical person.

If you're too smart it can limit you because you spend so much time thinking that you don't do anything.

Of course it's trivial, but then most things are.

I always wanted to be fashionable.

For a while I wanted to be a professional baseball pitcher, and then I wanted to be a musician and then sometimes I think I'd like to start a store for gift-wrapping Christmas presents ... But I feel I could do most things I set my mind to, except mechanical things, I'm not very good at that.

Art is not disposable. If you want it, you have to hold it and smell it and touch it and read the credits and enjoy it and put it on your wall.

You know, I'm really not interested in someone telling me that something's good or bad.

I don't think my parents know what I do.

Failure's a natural part of life.

There's no worse feeling in the world than realizing the play you've directed doesn't work.

Politics is not really my thing.

Anybody doing something brings something to it.

Imagine how asleep or utterly unperceptive and clueless you would have to be not to see yourself as absurd for the most part.

The projects I look for to produce or direct would not be ones in which I would want to act.