Mickey Rourke Quotes

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 had some things I had to fix. It took me 14 years to do it. But it was never really fun back in the day to work with directors who were a lot older and were like authoritarian and talking to you like that.

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

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."

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.

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.

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

Julian Schnabel painted a picture that he dedicated to my character in Rumble Fish. It was called The Motorcycle Boy. I remember when he brought it over to me at the Mayflower Hotel [in New York] years ago. This is when you and I knew each other.

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

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.

I spent so long studying really hard to become a fine actor, but threw it all away because I got the adulation and the fame so easily

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

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 started to shortcircuit because I had high aspirations for the film. I never told anybody that.

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.

Years ago I realized that maybe I made mistake, politically, when I turned a lot of that stuff down. I would go off to obscure places and make movies that six people went to see.

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.

My dogs are more important than my family.

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.

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.

I had a lot of anger inside me and that came out at times that were not particularly advantageous to me career-wise.

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.

I don't mind getting punched in the nose by a guy standing in front of me. It's getting stabbed in the back that I can't handle.

Boxers are very isolated - or isolated within their own camps.