Sean Penn Quotes

I'm not a breakfast eater.

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.

A SWAT team surrounded my house and came in every door. But it happened because on the day that we split up, Madonna developed a concern that if she were to return to the house, she would get a very severe haircut.

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

In short form I'll say it was an approach to the family and to [author] Jon Krakauer that then led to me seeming to rise to the top of the heap of several filmmakers that were trying to get the rights. And by top of the heap I mean in terms of being somebody that was trusted to do it as they said they were going to attempt to do it and that this way of doing it would be something they would be willing to allow.

I am a Justin Timberlake fan.

I don't think you can get away with putting your talents in a toilet bowl and not having them flushed away. Forever. There is a level of murder of one's soul and of the culture that they're supposed to be feeding vitamins to ...

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

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

There is a kind of sense of truth and reconciliation that is non-formalized, but it's understood and accepted. Haitians are Haitians and there is an inherent loyalty that forgives an awful lot.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Whatever I was able to do with those experiences certainly contribute to whatever I'm able to do as a director. The corruption in that is that most of what I acted in the last 10 years was to steal film school time from these guys. Those were the people I thought I could learn from as a director.

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.

Beauty doesn't ask for attention

What happens is things come to you - director, script - and if you respond to it, it's because it's tapping into some part of what's inside you, and different roles tap into different parts.

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

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

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.

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.

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

The heartbreak that it might not happen wasn't something that I wanted to face with any more weight. Then, when I got the call to go ahead I never thought for a second as I was approaching it who I would get - that would come later. Again, I think the idea was that I now had the rights to make the movie and I can start writing it but if I have to wait another 10 years before I find an actor that's right for it, I'd be very happy to do that.

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

I think we all have light and dark inside us.

Fulfilling what you start is why you start something.

The one thing you can count on in Hollywood - across the board - is cowardice.

I think that people like the Howard Sterns, the Bill O'Reillys and to a lesser degree the bin Ladens of the world are making a horrible contribution.

All I need are some tasty waves, a cool buzz, and I'm fine

I love acting, truly my favorite people are actors.

The thing that's very close in the process is writing and acting, not directing. Directing's very different.

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

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

I am a limousine liberal.

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

Well, I think that when you direct a movie or write it. And in the case of the two movies I did, I wrote and directed, they occupy a special place for you.

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.

One of the things you don't have in Haiti is you don't have anybody on crack doing something completely out of - that's unpredictable. Even at the worst times in Haiti, the violence that had happened, the lack of security that happened, was largely predictable because it was politically tied.

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

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

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

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

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

'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 foreground of my feeling. That place moves me. And I don't mean my country; it's part of our shared natural world that happens to be particular to a sense of wherever my storytelling inclinations come from and my own history of kind of being a road rat and travelling.

I really love to make movies.

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

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

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

The advice you give to young directors for sure is to go out and become some version of a successful movie actor. Do that first and say yes to people like Terrence Malick and Clint Eastwood and Woody Allen when they come and offer you movies. It's a great front row seat to filmmaking.

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 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.

If you don't vote, you don't matter.

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'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.

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

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.

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

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

When everything gets answered, it's fake.

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.

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

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

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

There is no re-inventing the wheel.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

There's not a lot of good movies being made.

I can't imagine being quite as lucky at any other time - I certainly never have been before. That goes right down from my producing partners to people like Eddie Vedder. But the two things that make me feel that this was meant to be now and not before was that the story itself has more resonance today - I find it a more important story today than it was then - and Emile.

When I go to bed at night and I think of humanity at large, I think of all those things.

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

My greatest interest in it was certainly not to avoid those things that were going to be controversial about the family but the interest I had in the story was predominantly what he was pursuing and not as much what he was fleeing.

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.

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

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.

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.