Top 100 Jack Nicholson Quotes
#1. You are more thoughtful because you don't act as quickly anymore. When I turned 70 it was the first time I felt young for my age. Fifty dropped on me like a ton of bricks - there is something about that number - but when 70 came along I felt good about it.
Jack Nicholson
#2. 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.
Jack Nicholson
#3. Just because you're perfectionist doesn't mean you're perfect.
Jack Nicholson
#4. I do pray. I pray to something ... up there. I have a God sense. It's not religious so much as superstitious. It's part of being human, I guess.
Jack Nicholson
#5. I like to not care that much about criticism, but I do care about it.
Jack Nicholson
#6. Always try in interviews to avoid the cliches about the problems of public life.
Jack Nicholson
#7. I guess this proves there are as many nuts in the Academy as anywhere else.
Jack Nicholson
#9. Charlize Theron and Cate Blanchett are very good actresses.
Jack Nicholson
#10. Take caution in your tone, commander. I'm a fair man, but this
heat is making me absolutely crazy.
Jack Nicholson
#11. I eat breakfast 300 yards from 4000 Cubans, who are trained to kill me, so don't think for one second that you can come down here, flash your badge and make me nervous.
Jack Nicholson
#12. Staying together is a challenge. We all have to accept qualities in other people that aren't always exactly what we want or need.
Jack Nicholson
#13. I have mainly been interested in acting. I think it's a great job, a fine way to live your life.
Jack Nicholson
#14. I just like art. I get pure pleasure from it. I have a lot of wonderful paintings, and every time I look at them I see something different.
Jack Nicholson
#15. The less people know about me, the easier my job is.
Jack Nicholson
#16. We learn how to kiss, or to drink, talk to our buddies-all the things that you can't really teach in social studies or history-we all learn them at the movies.
Jack Nicholson
#17. In my last year of school, I was voted Class Optimist and Class Pessimist. Looking back, I realize I was only half right.
Jack Nicholson
#18. I want a big 25-foot pink statue that holds my grave. Or I also might like the way the Indians did it. They hang you up on the top of a tree and the birds eat you. No, really I would probably choose cremating.
Jack Nicholson
#19. I suppose I can do more for a script as an actor than as a writer - in the film sense.
Jack Nicholson
#21. I want my kids to have a deep, inner feeling that it's alright to be happy, that you don't have to be constantly manufacturing problems that you don't really have.
Jack Nicholson
#22. Comedy is much harder, it's a lot more exacting. You can't just be real and you can't just use the same kind of techniques you use to fill up a regular scene.
Jack Nicholson
#23. I don't remember if I've been asked seriously to direct a picture. I understand that. I'm very good business for people as an actor and perhaps they'd rather I didn't.
Jack Nicholson
#24. I used to think that one of the great signs of security was the ability to just walk away.
Jack Nicholson
#25. 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.
Jack Nicholson
#26. I'd prefer if people had no impressions of me. As a kid, I had to tell my own family, "Please, just don't talk about me!" Because they always got it wrong. Always. I just didn't want them to tell anyone anything about me.
Jack Nicholson
#27. There's no point dwelling on what might or could have been. You just have to go forward.
Jack Nicholson
#28. I love working with women directors. They don't mind making you cute.
Jack Nicholson
#29. 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.
Jack Nicholson
#30. I'm such a perfectionist. I always feel overpraised or whatever. In the abstract, I know I'm a good person, a good professional. But it's nice to be noticed a little bit, ain't it?
Jack Nicholson
#31. Well, a younger woman is a type, but not necessarily a type for me. And what is a younger woman? I mean, I'm pretty old. Almost everyone is younger.
Jack Nicholson
#32. Women
a mistake, or did He do it to us on purpose?
Jack Nicholson
#33. If you think you're attractive, you're always attractive.
Jack Nicholson
#34. I think of a man and I take away reason and accountability.
Jack Nicholson
#35. Comedy is more difficult. You can look at scenes when you're doing a drama like, "Maybe it works," but in comedy, when you're doing it, either it works or it doesn't. You have to keep doing it until it does, and the requirement is more.
Jack Nicholson
#36. We are going as fast as we can as soon as we can. We're in a race against time, until we run out of money.
Jack Nicholson
#37. I am in an age group where it is rude to discuss money, and now it is all anyone cares about.
Jack Nicholson
#38. I'm certainly not as tough as people think. I'm not a fighter and so forth. I'd just as soon go home.
Jack Nicholson
#39. Once you've been really bad in a movie, there's a certain kind of fearlessness you develop.
Jack Nicholson
#40. Kids are life's only guaranteed, bona fide upside surprise.
Jack Nicholson
#41. Having kids is the most innately positive thing that anyone can do.
Jack Nicholson
#43. There's probably no one who understands Method acting better academically than I do, or actually uses it more in his work. But it's funny - nobody really sees that. It's perception versus reality, I suppose.
Jack Nicholson
#44. When they say I'm a great actor, I close my ears because it's not good for you to think that way.
Jack Nicholson
#45. I would never say, "I'm retired." I believe if I decided to just not work, in six months everybody would just forget whether you were working or not.
Jack Nicholson
#46. If men are honest, everything they do and everywhere they go is for a chance to see women.
Jack Nicholson
#47. If you get an impulse in a scene, no matter how wrong it seems, follow the impulse. It might be something and if it ain't - take two!
Jack Nicholson
#48. The minute that you're not learning I believe you're dead.
Jack Nicholson
#49. Decent people shouldn't live here. They'd be happier some place else.
Jack Nicholson
#50. With comedy, you have to do it right. In a drama, there's a lot of different ways to succeed in a moment. But comedy comes from reality. You can't try to be funny.
Jack Nicholson
#51. I'm not a power person. I like everyone to be on an equal footing.
Jack Nicholson
#52. I mean, it's real hard to be free when you're bought and sold in the marketplace.
Jack Nicholson
#54. One of my school friends' parents owned a minigolf course, and a bunch of us kids would play there all day in the summer. Two-under deuces was a good score.
Jack Nicholson
#56. You can follow the action, which gets you good pictures. You can follow your instincts, which will probably get you in trouble. Or, you can follow the money, which nine times out of ten will get you closer to the truth.
Jack Nicholson
#57. People who speak in metaphors should shampoo my crotch.
Jack Nicholson
#58. I am a person who is trained to look other people in the eye.
Jack Nicholson
#59. No issue is more compelling than the air we breathe, be it hot or cold, be it hawk or human.
Jack Nicholson
#61. I certainly knew my father. He just didn't happen to be my biological father.
Jack Nicholson
#62. I'm the age where we didn't have television as kids. So when I saw my nieces and nephews watching Howdy Doody, Kukla, Fran and Ollie, and so forth, I thought the world had gone mad.
Jack Nicholson
#64. Most of the early part of an actor's career, you do the jobs you get.
Jack Nicholson
#66. I wanted to be the best actor possible. I worked very hard at the craft of it.
Jack Nicholson
#67. Children give your life a resonance that it can't have without them.
Jack Nicholson
#68. I goddamn near lost my nose. And I like it. I like breathing through it.
Jack Nicholson
#69. I only take Viagra when I'm with more than one woman.
Jack Nicholson
#70. It's not like I'm starved for company - I have a few very good lady friends - but there's only a certain amount of times a woman wants to see you and never go out for dinner.
Jack Nicholson
#71. When it's over for a woman, it's over. You're not getting an appeal.
Jack Nicholson
#72. What's beautiful is all that counts, pal. That's all that counts.
Jack Nicholson
#73. 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.
Jack Nicholson
#74. I love the company of people. I always have and always will, it comes with my family. But earlier in life I might have got a little nervous if I was alone for a day or two in a row. I might think, "Where are they?" Now, I just go on doing naturally what I do.
Jack Nicholson
#75. My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son-of-a-bitch.
Jack Nicholson
#76. I don't believe in God now. I can still work up an envy for someone who has a faith. I can see how that could be a deeply soothing experience.
Jack Nicholson
#77. In this industry, there are only two ways up the ladder. Rung by rung or claw your way to the top. It's sure been tough on my nails.
Jack Nicholson
#78. On the birth of his son after having had two daughters: I finally got it right.
Jack Nicholson
#79. Through all permutations and youthful poetry, I came to believe that the film actor was the great "literateur" of his time.
Jack Nicholson
#80. For an actor, style comes last. You first have to implement the whole thing, but your style comes from the subconscious, which is the best part an actor brings to his work.
Jack Nicholson
#81. I believe in making all movies at their most reasonable. That I get a lot of money as an actor is because nobody else will get it if I don't.
Jack Nicholson
#83. The only way to break a bad habit was to replace it with a better habit.
Jack Nicholson
#84. I would never want to vilify somebody who considered abortion murder. I was an illegitimate child myself. I may not have existed today.
Jack Nicholson
#85. There's a period just before you start a movie when you start thinking, I don't know what in the world I'm going to do. It's free-floating anxiety. In my case, though, this is over by lunch the first day of shooting.
Jack Nicholson
#86. If you want your freedom, you have to be willing to work hard to exercise it.
Jack Nicholson
#87. I don't want to direct a movie as good as Antonioni, or Kubrick, or Polanski, or whoever. I want it to be my own. I think I've got the seed of it and, what's more, that I can make movies that are different and informed by my taste.
Jack Nicholson
#88. I love discourse. I'm dying to have my mind changed. I'm probably the only liberal who read Treason, by Ann Coulter. I want to know, you understand? I like listening to everybody. This to me is the elixir of life.
Jack Nicholson
#89. I used to be very quick, I would be able to leave the room and be back before you noticed. When you can't do that anymore you need to change the style of how you do things. But I'm very interested in life and you don't want to lose that.
Jack Nicholson
#90. Men dominate because of physicality, and thus they have mercy where women do not.
Jack Nicholson
#91. I don't have any fear of intimacy, but rather thrive on it, which is rare in a public person.
Jack Nicholson
#92. Well, I'm not going to sit here and pretend that I haven't been a rogue most of my life.
Jack Nicholson
#93. I'm very contra my constituency in terms of abortion because I'm positively against it. I don't have the right to any other view. My only emotion is gratitude, literally, for my life.
Jack Nicholson
#94. In the real world there's an after-effect of disappointment if you lose an argument. But if, to begin with, you're set up not to have this particular autonomy, then you're not disappointed.
Jack Nicholson
#95. And this, incidentally, is my thumbnail sketch of American marriage: A woman sees a man; she likes him. Now she jumps on this thing and rides it to some kind of standstill. Then she changes it and trains it, and to the exact degree that she's able to do this, she disrespects him.
Jack Nicholson
#96. I don't want people to know what I'm actually like. It's not good for an actor.
Jack Nicholson
#97. Age is the first limitation on roles that I've ever had to encounter, and I hit that awhile ago.
Jack Nicholson
#98. In other words, I wouldn't like to be an actor if I could only be real. I like to get wild, behaviorally wild, and it's crazy to think of any form where it's just one way.
Jack Nicholson
#100. I'm in the movie business; it's meant to be very cutthroat. But you won't find anybody that ever says I cheated them or manipulated them.
Jack Nicholson
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