Michael Douglas Quotes

I have some idea of the pressure of finding your own identity with a famous father.

When you're making pictures out of heartfelt passion, it hurts when someone calls them a calculated business move.

I tell my kids they are going to live to over 100.

For a long time, I can't say I was one who really enjoyed acting. I was always censoring it, or editing it, or analyzing it, rather than just going with it.

The quality of health care in Canada is excellent.

It's all about bucks, kid. The rest is conversation.

Oh, I get it, it's simple. PG means the hero gets the girl, 15 means that the villain gets the girl, and 18 means everybody gets the girl.

My memories of Las Vegas were all with my father when I was, like, a teenager. He was best friends with Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, and we'd come up and see the shows and go backstage afterwards and have dinner together. It was one of my first educations about stars and how they really are back stage.

My dad was a movie star. Having that name was good and bad. People think it's a silver spoon. It's not.

Of course I feel blessed that I have a wife that is 25 years younger.

I don't think tongue cancer is the best cancer for an actor.

I don't know if likeable, pleasant characters have enough conflict for me to want to do them. I admire those people, but I've never been that kind of screen presence who can do nothing. I need to do something.

Lunch? You gotta be kidding. Lunch is for wimps.

I thought I could never be the actor Dad was, so I avoided it for a while.

I met Michael Milken for the first time with Oliver Stone at the Drexel Burnham offices in Los Angeles.

To me, Bermuda is a real family spot.

Human Rights for everyone is the necessary foundation upon which all of us may build a world where everybody may live in peace and serenity and plenty.

Suddenly you've worked yourself up to the top of the pecking order and you say to yourself, okay, this is going to be fun.

I've always liked Tina Turner.

I am a Jew. Those are four words of pride. My Jewishness is as deep as my genes.

I have nothing against her, and in fact I'm very fond of my first wife. But we should have ended that marriage eight or 10 years earlier.

Serious is when they tell you, 'You've got cancer.' Cancer is serious, but then the rest of it is not.

I never really look at my movies.

Actors, I have to say, most of the time, they elevate things; they don't screw things up most of the time.

My movies are usually about stripping off the makeup, getting down to the skeleton.

In the movie 'Wall Street' I play Gordon Gekko, a greedy corporate executive who cheated to profit while innocent investors lost their savings. The movie was fiction, but the problem is real.

I'm a risk-taker. Most of my career has not been a joyful experience, but it has been challenging. I like the dangers.

Someone reminded me I once said, 'Greed is good.' Now it seems it's legal.

When I go on a holiday to a tropical place, I'll spray tan before I go.

I've always been somebody who, when I started a picture, never knew what the next picture would be.

When I look at myself as a younger actor, I see what a tight ass I was. I had a pretty big shadow because of my father and the comparisons. I was self-conscious about that. Now I realize there was nothing to be worried about.

I grew up on the East Coast and was going to go to an Ivy League School, but at the last minute I decided to be a hippy. It was the protest movements on the war, peace movements were going on at our university. It was a fantastic time.

Directors have so much else to do besides tell actors what to do. There are so many issues and problems.

I went into rehab to save my marriage, but I wound up saving myself.

I've taken blame about being a bad father - if being a bad father is working your butt off trying to create a career at one time.

Most of the stories I read are about my Hollywood pedigree.

I love kids, and I love having had this second chance to have a family.

I'm not a big filmophile. I don't watch movies a lot for a hobby. I spend all my time watching sporting events. Because, opposed to movies, you can never tell how they're going to end.

If your work isn't exciting, doesn't stir the emotions, where's the challenge? Where's the progress if you always play it safe?

It's a phenomenon that I see with young actors - a lot of American speaking parts going to British actors.

Greed is good! Greed is right! Greed works! Greed will save the U.S.A.!

I don't ever do those kind of epic, huge, green-screen movies.

You have to make entertaining movies. But like a good meal, it's nice to have a little food for thought after you walk out of the theater rather than just wiling away a couple of hours.

I was undeclared. I was in my third year of school. They said you have to decide upon a major, and my father was an actor. My mother was an actress. So, I thought theater might be the way to go.

Chemotherapy takes its toll; the more you keep doing it, you lose your energy, and it gets more difficult to swallow.

I believe there is a spirit within us, which we nurture based upon our efforts and what we bring to the world. But it doesn't come from the outside; it comes from the inside.

Paul Rudd is ripped.

With little knowledge of what it meant to be a Jew, I found myself passionately defending the Jewish people. Now, half a century later, I have to defend my son. Anti-Semitism, I've seen, is like a disease that goes dormant, flaring up with the next political trigger.

My marriage and my families come certainly before my career.

I guess there are some women who like older men, but it's a smaller group.

Even when you're acting with a producing hat, when you're in every scene, you're really conscious of trying to make everybody as good as they are, because ultimately you're trying to make the best movie possible.

Money never sleeps, pal

Players never die - they just try their luck at another table.

Actresses have more fear of being disliked. I, on the other hand, revel in it.

The message from national security experts and citizens around the world is clear: The only way to eliminate the global nuclear danger is to eliminate all nuclear weapons.

There is something about seeing rhinos and lions running free that excites you. It's not that you feel afraid; it's more like you're liberated by seeing them.

The thing with cancer is that you want to get it as early as you can.

The studios basically, besides developing some material, their strength is distribution. Distribution in any other business is a cost that you incur. You know, in a trucking business, you eat it. In a film business, distribution is a profit center.

People are goofy about the movie business, so you end up counting on friends you knew before you were successful. It is harder to make new friends because you are a little more cautious.

I don't look good in tights. I know that.

When you've accomplished a certain amount in your career, you're not so focused on your ambitions.

I don't even know why, but my entire career is contemporary films. Entire career! There's no period movies - there's one - but there's no period movies, no special effects movies. I just do character studies and so, some of them are gonna bump into each other, but I love the challenge, with a good script. I love the challenge of playing not a very pleasant or attractive character that seduces an audience or wins an audience over by the end.

I've been dying to do a Marvel picture for so long.

The Cold War's end pushed disarmament down most leaders' agendas. It's a sophisticated issue, which I think is one reason why it is not so hands-on to many people. It's not visceral. It's not like a starving child.

Control is what gives you privacy.

Like my father, like most actors, I was a pretty ambitious guy.

Cancer didn't bring me to my knees, it brought me to my feet.

Our economy is increasingly dependent on the success and integrity of the financial markets.

Do you know what absolute happiness is? For me, it is to wake up my kids in the morning - these little pieces of innocence - to wake them and find they're so happy to see me! It is unequivocal love, no question about it.

Cigar smoking by it's very nature is much more reflective than interactive.

My mother and father met at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. He was a senior and she was a junior, and their marriage didn't last very long.

Everything's so repressive now - it's the No generation. You can't do anything, you can't eat anything, you have to abstain.

There's nothing like a family crisis, especially a divorce, to force a person to re-evaluate his life.

Everybody knows about Las Vegas. It's a state of mind. Some people want to come with their kids and have a great weekend. Some people want to shop. Some people want to find hookers. Some people want to eat. Some people just want to gamble. It's a potpourri of decadence.

I've just kind of been used to carrying movies. I look back and I'm just used to being in every single scene in a lot of pictures.

'Wall Street' was a very important movie for me in terms of my career. I won an Oscar, and then the film 'Fatal Attraction' came right after it.

Out there is nothing but possibilities.

I'm an optimistic guy.

When you are a celebrity, nothing remains secret for very long.

You just have to know what your responsibility is to the movie, and live up to that, and be considerate of the other actors in the scene ... I have never been competitive in that way - I always want my leading ladies to be as good as they possibly can be.

The so-called 'last golden age,' in the 1970s, most of those movies were independent films.

Cancer has shown me what family is. It showed me a love that I never knew really existed.

Never knew how poor I was until I started making money.

Religion has certainly been shoved down my throat.

'Five Easy Pieces,' 'Easy Rider' - those are indie pictures; those were not studio pictures. They had relationships with studio distribution, but they were indies.

We must unite to make nuclear weapons a horror of the past.

My father did 90-plus films. He was Spartacus!

Like a lovely orchid, or anything else that's nurtured, marriage prospers and grows, but if it's ignored, it withers.

Liberace was one of the biggest stars in America. He was a kind of a phenomenon.

I enjoy provocative things that are questionable.

I have hardly ever worked with the same director twice. But when you have worked with a director before, you understand his behavior.

The arts are a celebration of life.

If a deal looks too good to be true, it probably is.

The one thing that men and women have in common - they both like the company of men.

'King of California' was just, I thought, a really great, fresh, original kind of script. I loved the tone, the mix of tragedy, comedy, and drama, and that it was a good part.

Celebrity gets you access to world leaders.

Capitalism is part of our system, but it's not for the faint of heart.

In 'Wall Street,' Charlie Sheen carried that movie.

I've always worked hard and played hard, and I'm sure I'll be cleaning up my act in the future.