Top 44 Mickey Rourke Quotes

I don’t care what Tom Cruise says about therapy.

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.

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

You want to earn respect in your old age. You want to walk into a restaurant and have people say: ‘There’s Mickey Rourke. He was great in ‘The Wrestler.’ You don’t want them jumping out of windows.

What I’ve got to do now is let them judge me for who I am as an actor and not for my notoriety.

As time goes by and you’re getting older and stuff like that – getting older sucks. You know, I hear all this crap about, ‘Oh, you can age with dignity.’ Really?

I’d just as soon do a big-budget movie as an independent one.

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

Winning an Oscar ain’t about performance. There’s a lot of politics involved.

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.

I always knew I’d accomplish something very special – like robbing a bank perhaps.

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.

My dogs are more important than my family.

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

I loved my mother, but I don’t like her.

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

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

The ladies love me and I love the ladies!

The acclaim I’m getting for ‘The Wrestler’ means everything in the world to me. But it also means I can’t take my foot off the gas pedal.

I try to find the right director who won’t compromise his or anyone else’s integrity, and yet be political enough to give the studio what they want, yet put up a fight to maintain that integrity.

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

It was the most fun I’ve ever had on a movie. It was one of the happiest times in my life. I was living in New York, and I really enjoyed acting at the time. Also, it’s funny because that was also the time when I went downhill.

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.

It’s no fun being a loser. Trust me.

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

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.

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

Hollywood’s famous for putting you in a box.

There’s always going to be a war going on inside of me. That’s just, I think, my make-up.

I love the first Godfather movie, part one. And two.

People are always afraid of the truth.

I’m not gonna rush out and see the next ‘Batman;’ I’m not big on formula movies.

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

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.

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

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 you lose everything, and I mean everything, you sit there in this empty room in the dark, and the only person who can get you out is you.

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

The hardest thing in life to do is to change.

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

Mitch Glazer and I went to high school together, and his mother was my English teacher for two years. She was my favorite teacher, and I followed Mitch’s career as a journalist, so we’ve kind of kept in touch over the years.

I didn’t have a childhood, really, because I worked my whole life and… other reasons. So when I had some success, I went ballistic. That was my childhood, and the party kept going on.

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

I started out fighting before I was acting, actually, then got hurt and got into the acting.