Mickey Rourke Quotes

I had achieved so much success in my career and then had this spectacular fall from grace that left me unemployed and living in a town, Los Angeles, that is built on envy. Once you fall, people don't really root for you to come back again. I'd go to restaurants where I always had the best table and half the time they wouldn't even let me pay. And then when I stopped making movies, the same places wouldn't even give me a lousy table, never mind the best one!

Once you've been somebody, really, you have a career and you're a nobody anymore, and you're getting older, you're living what's called a state of shame.

In Hollywood, you're always playing roles ... It's like going through the motions. But in real life, it's like, you gotta take care of business. It's not just the movies.

I get a call, and it's Howard Bingham, and he's got the champ on the line.Muhammad Ali didn't remember me from being a kid, but he was going, "Yeah, you're in bed, and you want your mama with you ... " It really helped so much. He spent 15 or 20 minutes on the phone with me. That's a memory that I'll always cherish.

If you look closely at some scenes in Diner, my eyes look like Dracula's.

Usually if you read a screenplay, no matter who's writing it, the bad guy is always written as a one-dimensional bad guy.

All that prosthetic makeup drains you. By the time it's lunch, you're done.

Acting was never my first choice as a profession, but I came to terms with it when I decided I better buckle down and be the best I can be at it.

I don't have many Hollywood friends anyway; I thought with my ability I didn't need to make those kind of relationships, but maybe I should have done. Might have made my life easier!

When you're young, working in a warehouse or selling hot dogs, you look at work - at acting - as something precious. It gets you out of the stink.

I never look backwards. I have always been an athlete. I boxed before I acted.

I behaved worse than anybody for 15 years, and you have to pay the price for that. I used to blame other people, then therapy made me realise I had to change.

I wanted to change my name to Romeo Florentino. Romeo Florentino - that's a good fighter's name.

Evan Rachel Wood is the best actress I've ever worked with, hands down.

People are always afraid of the truth.

When I did Sean Penn's movie, I think I was living in, like, a $500-a-month room, and someone called me up or bumped into me and asked me if I'd come up to work for a day. That sort of got me going a little bit. But it wasn't until Sin City [2005] that I kind of got back into the game.

By the end of the shoot [of Wrestler], my trainer was pushing me up three flights of stairs to my house and holding my arm like I was an old cripple. I had three MRIs in the first two months of working on the film. I felt like it really was over by the time we started shooting the movie.

I come from a violent background. So I became hard. I realised that I had made myself that way to deal with a feeling of abandonment and shame.

I used to love playing football in high school. I played with the same guys for 10 years.

I loved my mother, but I don't like her.

In order to understand the stock market we have to realize that, like anything enormous and inert, it's fundamentally stable, and, like anything emotion-driven, it's volatile as hell. Got that? Me neither.

I think the first year and a half that I was in New York I was having trouble just living somewhere. Back in them days the city was a lot different than it is now.

It's the formulaic studio movies the make money, and when they do, the actors in them are automatically movie stars.

Women are much stronger than men. When a woman says enough is enough, which means enough is enough. Man will always lie at her feet in the hope of return. I was lying. And somehow happy.

Actors should shut up about politics. They tend to be ill-informed finger-pointers who just cosy up to some flavour of-the-month liberal.

I always knew I'd accomplish something very special - like robbing a bank perhaps.

There's always going to be a war going on inside of me. That's just, I think, my make-up.

Since I knew wrestling was all choreographed, I thought, Oh, they don't get hurt at all. But I walked away with a renewed respect for the sport. Because I was very ignorant before - I knew nothing about it.

All I am hoping for is to be able to work - I think my best work is still ahead of me - I think all that I have been through in the last several years have only made me a better, more interesting actor.

It's no fun being a loser. Trust me.

I'm an old broken down piece of meat and I deserve to be all alone ...

I trained like an animal, but the thing is focus and concentration. When the bell rings it's like when the little red light goes on over the camera. And I can usually nail my lines on the first or second take because I'm right there.

Being out of work for 13 to 15 years is no walk in the park.

I was very ashamed of seeing a therapist because I thought only crazy people went, and then, after about nine years, I asked him, 'Well, was I really crazy?' And he nodded and said, 'You were but not any more.'

I'm the worst surfer in California. My balance is off from boxing.

Wrestling and boxing is like Ping-Pong and rugby. There's no connection.

I spent a lot of years trying to beat the system and, in the end, the system kicked my behind good.

I couldn't direct traffic.It's hard enough just acting.

Sometimes the independent movies can get a little too arty-farty. You watch the IFC Channel and you want to throw up. You don't always have to take things so serious, you know.

[The tension] between the Christians and Muslims goes back to the Crusades, doesn't it? It's too easy to blame everything on one guy. These are unpredictable, dangerous times, and I don't think that anyone really knows quite what to do.

Some of your worst gangsters are guys who were very low-key.

It's always been the case that you have the really rich, and the really poor. But hey, look, all the great empires have their periods where they rule the world, and then they crumble.

Bounty hunters these days - because everything is so sophisticated with computers and surveillance, it doesn't have to be a one-man-army-type guy who goes in and kicks a door down.

I don't care what Tom Cruise says about therapy.

When I was like 12 or 13,Muhammad Ali gave me a pair of his trunks that were white satin with gold stripes. They were full of blood, and my mother threw them away. I think it's the first time I ever cursed at my mother.

I've been with a lot of women, but who's counting? It's nothing I'm proud of. It's a physical need. Sometimes afterwards I just want to blow my brains out, it's so meaningless.

Mitch Glazer and I went to high school together, and his mother was my English teacher for two years. She was my favorite teacher, and I followed Mitch's career as a journalist, so we've kind of kept in touch over the years.

It was either therapy or die.

I have so many boxing gloves around my house that I would get them confused with other gloves.

I had gotten injured during the boxing, and I was supposed to take several months off because I'd had a couple of concussions, and so I sort of just left the boxing and got into the acting by accident.

Very few men can fall as far as I have and come back. People see me and it's like they've seen a ghost, like I'm back from the dead.

Where I come from, being a hard man is being able to take a good beating and then get back up again and carry on fighting.

A lot of those who let you down are those who seemed the closest to you.

I love the first Godfather movie, part one. And two.

I still work out most days. When I do it, I go full blast five or six days a week, two to three hours a day. I enjoy it. It's therapeutic for me.

I didn't have a childhood, really, because I worked my whole life and ... other reasons. So when I had some success, I went ballistic. That was my childhood, and the party kept going on.

I thought my talent would transcend my outspokenness. I was wrong.

I did think for many, many years that because of my ability I could beat the system. And I was wrong.

Change for me was really hard because I had built myself up to be a certain kind of man my whole life, as men are where I come from. I thought I got to handle things different that's gonna make me feel like a real pussy. For me it was hard to turn the other cheek. Even though it's a stronger choice. It was very hard to make the change, but I had to in order to survive. Otherwise they would have won.

I started out fighting before I was acting, actually, then got hurt and got into the acting.

In boxing, you don't know what's going to happen. In wrestling, it's already prearranged.

As time goes by and you're getting older and stuff like that - getting older sucks. You know, I hear all this crap about, 'Oh, you can age with dignity.' Really?

I started having some memory-loss issues. I took a neurological exam, and they said, "Well, you should stop fighting now." And I kept begging them for one more fight, one more fight, and the doctor said to me, "How much are they going to pay you?" I was supposed to fight three more times, and one would have been for a cruiser belt. So I said, "I just need to fight three more times." He said, "Listen, you can't even get hit in the head one more time, your neuro is so bad."

People ask me about that all the time. They say, "Did you ever think of directing?" And I say, "It's completely out of the question."

It was the most fun I've ever had on a movie. It was one of the happiest times in my life. I was living in New York, and I really enjoyed acting at the time. Also, it's funny because that was also the time when I went downhill.

A reputation is really hard to live down.

When I first met Alan Parker, who directed 'Angel Heart,' he'd heard so many horror stories about me that he was literally scared to death of me. Right away, he sat me down and said, 'I'm very scared of you. I've heard you're a very bad boy.'