Sean Penn Quotes

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

The bottom line is, you love your wife, you do your best with that.

I think that it is a good time for those who voted for the ban against gay marriage to sit and reflect and anticipate their great shame and the shame in their grandchildren's eyes if they continue that way of support. We've got to have equal rights for everyone.

I'm not a breakfast eater.

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

So if we have anything original to offer, it's to speak from our own life about the society we're in.

I'm not going to recommend recklessness but somewhere just short of it - testing yourself and proactively pursuing a rite of passage has become necessary because in western developed countries we've become very comfort-addicted.

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

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

I think we all have light and dark inside us.

Sacrificing American soldiers or innocent civilians in an unprecedented preemptive attack on a separate sovereign nation may well prove itself a most temporary medicine.

Sense of self, and the way one shares it, is perhaps the most valuable and poetic gift in the arsenal of one's life and craft.

I'm not going to have a better day, a more magical moment than the first time I heard my daughter giggle.

A child gets a fever in the United States and it's high enough and sustainable enough, all of us can bring a child to an emergency room. Most Haitians never had that opportunity. They didn't have the emergency room to bring them to. Virtually every time your child has 102 fever, you wait for it to die and you have no clean water to give it.

I still think photographers should be lashed out at.

They should be put in a cage where you can poke them with a stick for a quarter. But not in a hostile way, just for giggles. They really are on the attack against mankind; it's a disease. They should be helped somewhere. But I'd still like to poke them with a stick.

I'm not good at talking to strangers, whether they're sick children or they're - I'm just not good. I'm shy with it.

I think life's an irrational obsession.

I do not believe in a simplistic and inflammatory view of good and evil.

I believe this is a big world full of men, women, and children who struggle to eat, to love, to work, to protect their families, their beliefs, and their dreams.

There are a few directors around who I have some excitement about spending my $7 at the theatre watching their movies.

It has nothing to do with the emotional demands of a role;

I've done comedies that are as draining to me as any drama.

Child-rearing is my main interest now. I'm a hands-on father.

I've never really been one to get what they call stage fright so much.

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

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

All I need are some tasty waves, a cool buzz, and I'm fine

Venezuela and its revolution will endure under the proven leadership of Vice President Maduro.

You tolerate me, you really tolerate me. Accepting his Independent Spirit Award

Love is a mess, at best, and I figure it can be very real in spite of all the things people try to attach to it.

As a foreign worker in Haiti, speaking for myself, speaking for the workers, our organization is about 95 percent Haitian, but even foreign workers driving through, we have had very minimal security issues.

Yeah, I had a tremendous time shooting in Nebraska. I like that state a lot, all over it.

It's a foreground of my feeling. That place moves me. And I don't mean my country; it's part of our shared natural world that happens to be particular to a sense of wherever my storytelling inclinations come from and my own history of kind of being a road rat and travelling.

I think if you want good things to happen for a country like Haiti, then you need to provide the circumstances where the Haitians can do that.

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

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.

Yeah, I had actually tried to stop acting before I made Dead Man Walking.

There is no re-inventing the wheel.

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.

In between, I go broke because I seem to do movies where you're not paid a lot as an actor.

Marriage ain't easy, but it's great most of the time.

You try to do your best at what you're getting paid for.

I really love to make movies.

In short form I'll say it was an approach to the family and to [author] Jon Krakauer that then led to me seeming to rise to the top of the heap of several filmmakers that were trying to get the rights. And by top of the heap I mean in terms of being somebody that was trusted to do it as they said they were going to attempt to do it and that this way of doing it would be something they would be willing to allow.

I don't believe there are climate skeptics. I think there are people who indulge in a culture of what can be reduced to Fox network thinking. That has nothing to do with the politics that apply to the protection of quality of life in any sense. It's like talking to a member of a cult.

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

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.

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.

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.

The one thing you can count on in Hollywood - across the board - is cowardice.

One of the reasons people sell out so quickly is because even the talented think they're frauds. It's a culture that doesn't encourage people to believe in the work they do. You're told to second-guess yourself all the time. That's where I think a little hostility and arrogance can save you. And I've never been lacking for either.