Jack Nicholson Quotes - Page 10

OK, the director makes the movie. But some movies can't get made without someone like me in them.

If I go into a restaurant there's a very good chance that I'm going to spend my time being the mayor. If I want to have a good time, I'm happier having dinner here.

If you're going to write, write one poem all your life, let nobody read it, and then burn it. This is very young thinking, I confess, but it is the seminal part of my life.

I suppose I can do more for a script as an actor than as a writer - in the film sense.

When you use a dialect, you worry that the people you're imitating will think you're making fun of them.

Freedom in every sense but primarily political sense, a rise in repression that stems from a repression of sexuality. It's AIDS, it's herpes, it's this, it's that. Ask any saloon owner what's happened to social life in America in the past 12 years and they'll tell you it's a different world and these people are strongly misinformed by the media, peer pressure.

As an actor, I want to give in to the collaboration with the director because I don't want my work to be all the same. The more this can be done with comfort, the more variety my work has had.

I like to not care that much about criticism, but I do care about it.

I goddamn near lost my nose. And I like it. I like breathing through it.

I never had a policy about marriage. I got married very young in life and I always think in all relationships, I've always thought that it's counterproductive to have a theory on that.

I was invited to join the MGM cartoon department. But if I'd started work in animation I'd have had to take a cut in salary, so I didn't.

I love writing, but I stopped because I felt I was more effective approaching filmmaking from a different vantage point.

I'm a New Wave baby, so I got very stimulated by foreign film.

It's the post-literate generation that is most disturbing to a movie-maker. The explosions and the knifings. People like to go to what's hot and you can't get past a certain gross unless you involve children who go more than once.

I sort of understood that when I first started: that you shouldn't repeat a success. Very often you're going to, and maybe the first time you do, it works. And you love it. But then you're trapped.

It [TV] is the cancer of film. It's why people can't be educated to film. In the late '60s, we expected to see a movie or two every week and be stimulated, excited and inspired. And we did. Every week after week. Antonioni, Goddard, Truffaut - this endless list of people. And then comes television and home video. I know how to work exactly for the big screen, but it doesn't matter what I think about the art of movie-making versus TV.

Million bucks won't see you through a major health crisis.

You have to do every movie one at a time. Trilogy is contrary to this ideology. My nightmare is to wake up and find myself the host of a TV series.

I'm not a power person. I like everyone to be on an equal footing.

I look for a director with a script he likes a lot, but I'm probably after the directors more than anything.

Because of the way the business is structured, I have sometimes turned down scripts that I might otherwise have accepted had I known who was directing them.

Because you know, down deep in my heart, when all is said and done, I still live under the illusion that basically people think of me as an up-and-coming young actor.

There is no way you can get people to believe you on screen if they know who you really are through television.

I don't believe that relationships are fixed things. People are necessarily complex and confused beings. We don't always do the right thing, say the right, and behave the same way or the way we always want to behave.

Financially, I've lost money and made money, but I know my way around financially.