Top 35 Sean Penn Quotes

I choose movies that I think will speak to what’s important.

There is no re-inventing the wheel.

I think that I’ve still not been successful at playing the role of the retired actor, and I’d like to work on that.

Anger can be a problem, but it has tremendous potential, too. It’s just figuring out what to do with it.

There is a strength of character in the people who have, by and large, never experienced comfort.

In school, I was a genius of the year preceding the year I was in, every year.

Selling a movie feels like a hustle to every bone in my body. Many actors have careers dominated by modeling. They’re all over the place. It turns me off. People who are good at what they do ought to practice something bigger.

I love stories about people who are smart enough to know that what they’re doing is destroying them, but that knowing that doesn’t help them.

Whatever one considers art to be, there is in many people a hunger to express themselves creatively and to feel authentic in doing that.

A lot of critics sometimes get into analyzing the way actors direct versus non-actors directing. And they really always miss it. It’s one of those things where, by not being practitioners, they just came up with something that made sense to them.

At this stage, what would be rewarding would be for audiences to want to watch.

I’m always frustrated when somebody makes a movie out of a book and they leave the book behind, or the heart of it.

I like to believe that love is a reciprocal thing, that it can’t really be felt, truly, by one.

I really love to make movies.

I think we all have light and dark inside us.

When you act in a film, you’re inevitably surrounded by people you didn’t choose, right down to the set painter. I like being able to pick the family I’m waking up to in the morning that’s going to make this group effort to tell a story that applies to what’s interesting to me at that stage in my life.

The thing that’s very close in the process is writing and acting, not directing. Directing’s very different.

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

That on a romantic level, if you feel it about somebody and it’s pure, it means that they do too.

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.

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.

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.

I had a house burn down once, and everything in life burned, except my family, and it was so liberating. I didn’t have a bad moment about it. It sort of reinvigorated my interest in a lot of things.

I am a limousine liberal.

My favorite thing to do is not act – it’s that simple.

I don’t have any particular excitement about working with any specific director or actor at this point.

I cannot tell you that I ever fell in love with the theater as an audience. I fell in love with the theater as an actor for a period of time, but I have struggled as an audience, and I struggle more now than then. I was always a movie guy.

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

I’ve always operated under the notion that audiences don’t always know when they’re being lied to, but that they always know when they’re being told the truth.

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

Somewhere along the line, the actions of this government are the actions of me.

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

I think life’s an irrational obsession.

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