Sean Penn Quotes

There's the old notion that where there's choice, there's chaos, and where there's no choice, there's clarity. If you've got no choice, you've gotta be there, and you've gotta have your heart in it. It leads to a much less self-conscious life.

The first instinct is love.

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

A child gets a fever in the United States and it's high enough and sustainable enough, all of us can bring a child to an emergency room. Most Haitians never had that opportunity. They didn't have the emergency room to bring them to. Virtually every time your child has 102 fever, you wait for it to die and you have no clean water to give it.

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.

And dressed her [Madonna] up like a turkey. After I read that stuff, I thought long and hard about what one would do to dress someone up like a turkey. And I nailed it. I figured you've got to get out the Playtex glove, blow it up and put the glove over the head.

Women are the best. The toughest. The bane of my existence. And I'll forever fall for it.

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.

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.

I can make a better living as an actor than I can as a director. Though I certainly would prefer to be directing movies.

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

If you don’t vote, you don’t matter.

I'd do anything to get a performance, short of malice.

I get a little scared of words like maturity.

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

On any movie I'm involved with, I say what I think.

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.

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

If you're willing to put two thoughts into a picture then you're already ahead of the game.

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

I can tell you that my contribution based on my interpretation of the book is unchanged. The other things, in terms of doing the research and following the trail of it, were probably pretty similar to what I would have done then. I think that what makes me celebrate that it took the 10 years is the various other people and contributors that I ended up having on board.

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

Today, maturity is a word I associate with spirituality. It's one of those words that cause people to change their voice. When your voice gets higher because of what you're saying, there's a problem. To me, the conflict of life is part of the joy of life. There's got to be a recognition of the friction that exists. Maturity seems somehow about getting careful. I don't want to be careful.

The bottom line is, you love your wife, you do your best with that.

I am a Justin Timberlake fan.

It's only in innocence you find any kind of magic, any kind of courage.

Love is a mess, at best, and I figure it can be very real in spite of all the things people try to attach to it.

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.

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.

When everything gets answered, it's fake.

As a foreign worker in Haiti, speaking for myself, speaking for the workers, our organization is about 95 percent Haitian, but even foreign workers driving through, we have had very minimal security issues.

The major studios are by and large banks, and they give you what is by and large a loan to make a movie. Like banks, they want their money back plus.

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

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.

I love acting, truly my favorite people are actors.

I don't see myself as a different guy than I was ten years ago. I don't have aspirations to be. It's really about where you're putting your energies. That's changing a lot.

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.

Putting something in a movie because it's in the news doesn't make it political to me. If you're not going outside the same old, same old, if you're not pushing the envelope, then you're not doing anything. A good movie is a political thing.

Yeah, I had a tremendous time shooting in Nebraska. I like that state a lot, all over it.

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.

I don't want to lie, play games, hurt somebody, or get hurt. You can only go forward in one direction.

Well, look at all of these summer blockbusters. You can't help but laugh a little, because you've already seen a lot of these movies 482 times.

Haiti kind of gets a hold of you.

Jon Krakauer had documented it very accurately and very well but this kid made a real impression on people, and likewise they on him. To talk to them was very moving in many cases because they talk about him like they saw him yesterday. In most cases they knew this kid for a couple of weeks in their whole life and he just lasted with them.

Venezuela and its revolution will endure under the proven leadership of Vice President Maduro.

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

There is no re-inventing the wheel.

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