Mickey Rourke Quotes

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.

A couple of guys won Academy Awards for the things that I turned down. Today, after coming to terms with everything, after being in therapy for a long time-there are areas where I will compromise.

In boxing, you don’t know what’s going to happen. In wrestling, it’s already prearranged.

I still work out most days. When I do it, I go full blast five or six days a week, two to three hours a day. I enjoy it. It’s therapeutic for me.

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.

I had a lot of anger inside me and that came out at times that were not particularly advantageous to me career-wise.

Once you’ve been somebody, really, you have a career and you’re a nobody anymore, and you’re getting older, you’re living what’s called a state of shame.

People ask me about that all the time. They say, “Did you ever think of directing?” And I say, “It’s completely out of the question.”

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

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.

I never look backwards. I have always been an athlete. I boxed before I acted.

I don’t have many Hollywood friends anyway; I thought with my ability I didn’t need to make those kind of relationships, but maybe I should have done. Might have made my life easier!

The hardest thing in life to do is to change.

Where I come from, being a hard man is being able to take a good beating and then get back up again and carry on fighting.

I’m an old broken down piece of meat and I deserve to be all alone . . .

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.

I don’t mind getting punched in the nose by a guy standing in front of me. It’s getting stabbed in the back that I can’t handle.

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

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 spent so long studying really hard to become a fine actor, but threw it all away because I got the adulation and the fame so easily.

It’s no fun being a loser. Trust me.

I get a call, and it’s Howard Bingham, and he’s got the champ on the line.Muhammad Ali didn’t remember me from being a kid, but he was going, “Yeah, you’re in bed, and you want your mama with you . . .” It really helped so much. He spent 15 or 20 minutes on the phone with me. That’s a memory that I’ll always cherish.

When I first met Alan Parker, who directed ‘Angel Heart,’ he’d heard so many horror stories about me that he was literally scared to death of me. Right away, he sat me down and said, ‘I’m very scared of you. I’ve heard you’re a very bad boy.’

I’m only as rich as my next film.

I couldn’t direct traffic. It’s hard enough just acting.

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

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

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 come from a violent background. So I became hard. I realised that I had made myself that way to deal with a feeling of abandonment and shame.

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

Comeback is a good word, man.

A reputation is really hard to live down.

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

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

I grew up in a gym in Miami, the one where Muhammad Ali trained. I had 142 amateur fights and lost three.

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

The ladies love me and I love the ladies!

You know, back in acting school they always teach you, ‘Make bold choices and look for activities that are interesting.’

People need medicine and they need therapists.

When you’re young, working in a warehouse or selling hot dogs, you look at work – at acting – as something precious. It gets you out of the stink.

Actors should shut up about politics. They tend to be ill-informed finger-pointers who just cosy up to some flavour of-the-month liberal.

Bounty hunters these days – because everything is so sophisticated with computers and surveillance, it doesn’t have to be a one-man-army-type guy who goes in and kicks a door down.

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.

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

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.

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

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