Mickey Rourke Quotes

Hollywood's famous for putting you in a box.

Wrestlers are all pretty busted-up by the ends of their careers.

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

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

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

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.

It was either therapy or die.

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.

People are always afraid of the truth.

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

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

The two sports are as different as Ping-Pong and rugby. In boxing, you don’t know what’s going to happen. In wrestling, it’s already prearranged. But the thing I didn’t know about wrestling is that you really get hurt. Because, you know, you’re wrestling in front of a live audience, and you end up doing things like jumps or slams, and 40 percent of the time you don’t land right.

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 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!

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 have a really good relationship with a lot of designers. I like Gaultier, Billionaire and Cavalli.

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

I probably did a dozen plays, like Off-Off-Broadway stuff.

Comeback is a good word, man.

I never knew my father, and I'd hate to repeat that kind of cycle with my own children, because I'd also want to be there for them no matter what.

[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.

A lot of the stuff I am now seeing is edgy, raw kinda material.

I tried to change my name for the fights, but the only way they could pay me money was if I used my own name. I wanted to change my name to, like, Romeo something-or-other, and they said, "No, we can't do that. We've got to use Mickey Rourke." Because they paid me a lot of money to go over to Europe and Asia to fight.

A reputation is really hard to live down.

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.

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.

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."

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

I had a bonding problem when I went off and boxed for five years. I was over in Europe and Asia fighting because I wanted to do something different; I was tired of acting. But the thing is, when I was done doing that, I couldn't get a job.

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

A couple of guys won Academy Awards for the things that I turned down. Today, after coming to terms with everything, after being in therapy for a long time-there are areas where I will compromise.

Hey, baby, nobody suffers like the poor.

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

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 was very immature when I was young, and for me there was no balance. Everything was just all or nothing.

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.

Sometimes, when a man is alone, that's all you got is your dog.

I grew up in a gym in Miami, the one where Muhammad Ali trained. I had 142 amateur fights and lost three.

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.