Sean Penn Quotes

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

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

I really love to make movies.

Well, it was interesting because when I was going to do it the first time in my head was Leonardo DiCaprio [for Chris] and Marlon Brando was going to play the character that Hal Holbrook eventually played. But then when it wasn't to be and there was no promise that it ever would be I think some part of me didn't want to attach specifics to it anymore - actors or anything else - because I wanted to see it made that much more badly.

Rebel is just as bad a word as maturity.

There is no shame in my saying that we all want to be loved.

When I was growing up and somebody like Robert De Niro had a movie come out, it was a cultural event. Because he had such a confidence and a single mission that was so intimate.

Well, I'm pretty anti legends - I just don't think they're useful. So that certainly wouldn't be my intention. But will it contribute to that? Sure. Any medicine can be mis-used. But I think that there is a great courage, innocence and magic to him that more than a legend is about connection.

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

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.

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

That was madness. You're never going to bring one of those down with a handgun.

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.

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

You're always having to live more to fuel something new. It's an obligation to yourself and to the audience. The personal baggage that comes with being a known actor just adds to that struggle.

I'm not a breakfast eater.

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 Malick himself never managed to explain it to me clearly.

When you get divorced, all the truths that come out, you sit there and go, 'What the f**k was I doing? What was I doing believing that this person was invested in this way?' Which is a fantastically strong humiliation in the best sense. It can make somebody very bitter and very hard and closed off, but I find it does the opposite to me.

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.