Josh Brolin Quotes

My craziest on-set story comes from during the Goonies, when I came up to Spielberg and said that I wanted to climb the walls of the tunnels and that it represented my mother's womb, for some odd reason. I was reading Stanislawski at the time and Spielberg's response was "Why don't you just act."

When the AIDS epidemic first started there were people who said, "Well, if there weren't gays, then we wouldn't have this problem. It's got to be because of them - let it be them instead of us." But when you educate yourself about it, you can't help but realize that we're all affected by it. I think that things like that just become too daunting for people.

It takes me 10 minutes to get ready to go out, and that includes the shower.

I covered my face because they had taken my wisdom teeth out.

I only took a high school acting class because there was no other class I wanted to take. I loved it, but I was always against acting as a profession. I didn't like the monetary fluctuations I saw.

I'm very happy to be involved with great filmmakers.

I read "Milk" and immediately I was very emotional after reading it and then I saw the documentary - the one that Rob Epstein did - and I said that's it. I saw it with my daughter and that was it. This thing is a different thing. It's like I've been offered these kind of superhero movies or "Terminator" or whatever those movies are and I just go ahh.

Folks can believe what they like but eventually a man's got to declare if he's going to do what is right.

At least George W. Bush feels like - and I've heard him say it - "You can't judge me now, because look at Abraham Lincoln. When he was in the middle of that war and 600,000 people died, he was vilified for the Gettysburg Address because they felt it was too short and almost insulting, and now you look back and it's considered one of the great speeches of all time and he's considered one of the great presidents of all time."

In fact, I am so happy to be turning 40 and finally having a reason to take responsibility for my own behavior. It's also worked for me in terms of my physical appearance and emotional make-up and people entrusting me to bring the things a role deserves. I don't know whether that's depth or being a curmudgeon or what.

You might be an interested guy, an interested reported then I get to know you and then I know you're this also and you're this also and you may hide it in a certain way. That's what I love.

'W.' is not necessarily a political film, but it was sort of a contrasting reality for me to get into George W. Bush as a character because of how I felt about his administration before I started making the film.

Nothing misleads people like the truth.

It just seems to me that from the Republican perspective, there's so much focus on how bad the other side is, as opposed to their running on their own trajectory within the issues.

I have to tell you, you can't have an ego when you're an actor. A lot of actors have them, but in reality most of those people are just sensitive artists dying for a hug and a compliment.

I do think, from the other side, that George W. ush was somewhat of an innocent in his thinking about what Ronald Reagan did during the Cold War and by bringing democracy to Eastern Europe. I think he believed that he could do the same thing by bringing democracy - or Midland, Texas, really - to the Middle East. I truly think he felt it was possible. "I want to do for the Middle East what Reagan did for the Soviet Union."

Back then they had Elvis and they thought Elvis was so risqué. So everyone has their perception to what innocence is.

My dad didn't often bring me to the set, being an actor himself, so my infancy as an actor was wracked with a lot of giggles and nervousness.

You have no idea, especially in green screen, what movie you're doing. You really don't. And then, you see the movie and you're like, "Oh, my god, I'm on a cliff right now! I'm having sex right now! I thought I was dancing."

I'd heard rumors about Oliver Stone before we went to work on and I don't get it. To me, he's one of the most sensitive directors. He is just fascinated by why people act in the ways that they do. His movies are an excuse to explore that idea, and he wants to work with people who are as passionate about exploring it as he is. So we got along brilliantly.

I grew up, especially as an actor thinking that I had to move to New York to be a good actor. But after a while you start to live the world a little bit and you start to appreciate where you're from.

Regardless of whether there was ballot manipulation or not, you still have 50 million people who voted for George W. Bush in the 2000 election. And why? Because he's fallible? Because he reminds you of us? That's what we do. We are hiring these people. They don't hire themselves. It's irresponsible to disregard this guy as some bumbling, blathering idiot who has no intelligence whatsoever.

I read comic books and stuff but I didn't know a lot about it.

I've never gotten bitter about where I was at in my career. I've always earned enough money to put my kids through school and eat and all that, so I was never one of those guys who said, "Why am I not in this other position? Why am I not that other guy? Why am I me?"

When accepting or preparing for a role, fear is the motivating factor.

I remember at the premiere of my second movie I started crying. I thought, I'm so bad that I either have to stop this and do something else or learn what I'm doing.

We talked to Sergei Bodrov who did "Mongel" who I thought was incredible. There was a lot of people who've done a lot of things that I really appreciate and then you go back to the Italian spaghetti westerns that our spaghetti westerns were based off of so I've seen everything.

Suddenly, I'm in movies that people are excited about, and that is a nice change.

I love the whole of California, I have places... my whole thing is with all the money I make, I just want to buy as many places in California as I can because I love it.

As an actor, doing it for 30 years, with every movie, you're trying to figure out a way to make it more naturalistic and more organic to humanity. When you have lines like, "Never let the monster out," it's hard.

It's probably a bit of a power trip when you befriend somebody enough that they trust you to tell you things.

I don't have a favorite I like and then I'll go and watch "Days of Heaven" and I go how beautiful is that. So I think, at least my idea, was lets bring something again that's primitive and guttural but then let's also do something beautiful where you're outside and this isn't a typical western setting. It's lush. It's green. It's beautiful.

I'm really, really lucky. I was given my dad's good genes.

I got picked on a lot. I was a complete geek in school. I had braces. I didn't have the hot girlfriend. I wasn't ever sought after. I was a stocky, awkward kid who got laughed off the tennis court when I tried that.

Anything that is absurd I see as a Coen brothers' influence! The Coen brothers are my favorite people period.

The last really expensive trip we took was so uncomfortable. It's so lazy. I want somebody to give me a great $30 massage as opposed to a bad $265 massage.

Fear - there's always fear. You re-create yourself in every movie, don't you?

You've got this guy who refuses to die for some reason whether it be a physical or metaphysical reason or spiritual reason so you can do anything. You can kill off anybody and you can still bring them back because he's kind of half there and half in reality, you know?

Football? Forget it. I didn't have that thing inside me where I wanted to smash against somebody and watch them break. I was too sensitive for that and disliked being that sensitive.

Rebellion, just to be clear, can mean holding onto some of your own integrity, of not playing into the idea of sensationalism. We all have our moments, and that's your guys' job - to take those moments and make them turgid, gaseous, make them big, and it's bigger than the person is. When you start believing your own press, that's when it gets really sad.

I used to go to Vegas and play the horses, and then I realised how ridiculous that was. There is no winning in gambling, but there is on the stock market.

You have to be okay with wins and losses. You can't just be looking for the wins and, when the losses happen, you can't buy more and more because you're sure it's going to bounce. We call that revenge trading.

I love the competitive part of stocks. A lot of fear and greed, that's all it is. All I see is green and red.

That's what's great about Howard Zinn. Here's a guy who says, "Look, democracy doesn't come from above - it comes from below." The only way change will ever happen is if we speak up, and we have to know that it actually has an impact. Because we have a lot more power than we think we do, I think.

When I was in jail I could only think about what the average person has to go through - the person who has no power to go to the press or no money to hire a lawyer.

I know that, for me, working with people like Robert Rodriguez and Ridley Scott and the Coen brothers and Oliver Stone and Gus Van Sant was so much easier than working with a lot of the people I had worked with before, because with these guys, there's not a lot of ego involved. It's all about the work. It's all about how to make the story better. So at the end of the day, you feel a trust that you usually don't feel - or at least I haven't felt in the past with most people.

There's always been violence in movies, and there will always be violence in movies. Whether it lends to the one psychotic that's out there, thinking the worst thoughts you could possibly thing, is always going to be a mystery.

The only way change will ever happen is if we speak up, and we have to know that it actually has an impact. Because we have a lot more power than we think we do, I think.