Top 100 Michael Caine Quotes
#1. I never bring a role home with me. The moment they say, 'It's a wrap,' it's gone completely. I'm a totally ruthless professional, and life is my family, not my work.
Michael Caine
#2. I'm every bourgeois nightmare - a Cockney with intelligence and a million dollars.
Michael Caine
#3. I'd never been in one of those great big blockbusters.
Michael Caine
#4. I had been in that part of the world as a soldier in Korea, so I had been interested in Vietnam.
Michael Caine
#5. I don't have to work, really, but I do enjoy working, and I do enjoy getting paid.
Michael Caine
#6. Do I believe in God? Yes I do. When you've had a life like mine, you have to.
Michael Caine
#7. If you're a movie star, you get the girl, you lose the girl, and then you get her back. But if you're a character like me, you lose the girl, then you get another one, then you get another one, then you lose them all, then you lose your life.
Michael Caine
#8. You can see all sorts of things in film acting if you know where to look and what to look for. One thing I often notice is that the actor is looking for his mark, the place where he has to stand to be in the right place in the shot.
Michael Caine
#9. The difference between a movie star and a movie actor is this - a movie star will say, 'How can I change the script to suit me?' and a movie actor will say. 'How can I change me to suit the script?'
Michael Caine
#10. Use the difficulties - if you can't avoid them
Michael Caine
#11. Since I was 19, I've had the most fun possible every single day, even when I had a rough life. It was the army which taught me about life, and the theater which taught me how good it could be.
Michael Caine
#12. I'm looking for me to disappear, and the acting to disappear, and all you see is a real person.
Michael Caine
#13. I prefer to remake flops. Dirty Rotten Scoundrels was a remake of a flop, and The Quiet American is a remake of a flop.
Michael Caine
#14. I'll always be there because I'm a skilled professional actor. Whether or not I've any talent is beside the point.
Michael Caine
#15. I'm trying to work only with established, respected directors. I took a lot of bad scripts and worked for a lot of lazy directors, and it was discouraging to go to the screenings and see that the director had added nothing, the editor had added nothing, there was nothing to see.
Michael Caine
#16. Great acting is about listening to what they are saying ... not waiting to deliver your lines.
Michael Caine
#17. A lot of people said, Who do you think you are? I told them I know exactly who I am and I'll tell you exactly where I'm going.
Michael Caine
#18. I felt a tremendous sadness for men who can't deal with a woman of their own age.
Michael Caine
#19. I don't think you retire from movies; movies retire you.
Michael Caine
#20. You're your first best audience, long before anybody else hears you. So don't be an easy audience. Keep asking for more.
Michael Caine
#21. I wear a baseball cap all the time, which I would never normally wear, and I walk very fast.
Michael Caine
#22. 80 percent of any gang is not there to attack someone. They're there so no one will attack them.
Michael Caine
#23. If you're a movie actor, you're on your own - you cannot control the stage. The director controls it.
Michael Caine
#24. Hey, I always say: if you want a quiet life, become a monk.
Michael Caine
#25. We should vote for the welfare of the country, not for the welfare of the party.
Michael Caine
#26. If I see any injustice done, I have a big enough mouth and the position to open up about it.
Michael Caine
#27. The Quiet American is anti the people who took them into the Vietnam War.
Michael Caine
#28. I started with the firm conviction that when I came to the end, I wanted to be regretting the things that I had done, not the things I hadn't.
Michael Caine
#29. Comedy is underrepresented in every actor's life, because it's so bloody difficult to write.
Michael Caine
#30. I'm hoping there's an afterlife. As you get older, you hope even more fervently.
Michael Caine
#31. For all my education, accomplishments, and so called 'wisdom' ... I can't fathom my own heart.
Michael Caine
#32. I was a repertory actor, which meant that I did a play every week. I was a different character every week; for a year, I was doing 40 or 50 characters.
Michael Caine
#33. The old guys like me started in the theatre. I was in the theatre for nine years.
Michael Caine
#35. At 69, I got the girl! And it wasn't a 68-year-old girl, either.
Michael Caine
#36. When I was a young actor I was in a lot of film doing one day work and two days' work, and they've included all those titles, which I don't even remember. I think I've played the lead in about 75 movies.
Michael Caine
#37. I never look back at all. All of my sentiment and emotion goes into my family. I'm an extremely family oriented person and I have a very, very happy family life. That doesn't just include blood relations. I have friends who are close to me.
Michael Caine
#38. When I was 6 my father went to fight in the war, so he was my big hero. I thought he was the greatest thing.
Michael Caine
#39. I don't meet stockbrokers or carpenters or coal miners; I spend all day with actors, composers and photographers.
Michael Caine
#40. I'm forever testing myself. As a person and as an actor, I have no sense of competition.
Michael Caine
#41. Some men aren't looking for anything logical, like money. They can't be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.
Michael Caine
#42. Obsession is a young man's game, and my only excuse is that I never grew old.
Michael Caine
#43. I've got a lot of back-up because my father was a Catholic, my mother was a Protestant, I was educated by Jews and I'm married to a Muslim. So I won't lose out on a technicality.
Michael Caine
#44. I think I have the secret of a successful L.A. restaurant, especially now that so many Europeans live there. You have to have a place where they can see out the windows, see the world passing by. Europeans fancy that.
Michael Caine
#45. At age 11, I went to a Jewish school. I speak Yiddish. I'm Church of England Protestant. My father was Catholic, and my mother was Protestant. My wife is a Muslim.
Michael Caine
#46. My problem was that I was blond. There were no heroes with blond hair. Robert Taylor and Henry Fonda, they all had dark hair. The only one I found was Van Johnson, who wasn't too cool. He was a nice, homely American boy. So I created my own image. It worked.
Michael Caine
#47. I've had such a great time, I'd like to come back as me - and do it all over again.
Michael Caine
#49. If you put someone on screen long enough, they become the hero.
Michael Caine
#50. I don't think human beings are bad. They're weak. And that's what makes 'em bad.
Michael Caine
#51. It's funny, people ask me, 'What would you consider the most romantic track on your record Mr Caine?' And I say 'Swollen' by Bent, and they say 'I think he's off his rocker!'
Michael Caine
#52. Oh, what a shock. My career must be slipping. This is the first time I've been available to pick up an award.
Michael Caine
#53. I've made the transition from star to character actor and I'm thoroughly enjoying it.
Michael Caine
#54. A man should dress in a way that you don't notice. He looks good and you don't know why. But it's the tailoring, the materials, and the clothes.
Michael Caine
#55. My view of actors is that basically they're all harmless lunatics who'd be on the psychiatrist's couch, except that we get this sort of catharsis every six months or so, and we go and be absolutely someone else.
Michael Caine
#56. I try to make everyone around me feel comfortable.
Michael Caine
#57. You don't make any money when you're my age. The stars get it all. That's a lie, actually.
Michael Caine
#58. If you're blond, as I am, and you have blond lashes, you have to wear mascara, otherwise you're invisible on stage.
Michael Caine
#59. Ive read an awful lot of books, Ive read alot of awful books
Michael Caine
#60. If you're an actor and you don't act for a long time you sort of think, I wonder if I can still do it.
Michael Caine
#61. I feel like 35. At 35 you're old enough to know something and young enough to look forward to what you can do with the knowledge. So I stayed at 35!
Michael Caine
#62. In film, other actors' performances really are not your concern. If the other actor isn't giving you what you want, act as though he were.
Michael Caine
#63. In my opinion, everybody is getting older and older. We have a great deal of dementia because nobody grew old enough to get it.
Michael Caine
#64. I've never been competitive with other actors. I've been competitive with myself and I'm my own worst critic, a terrible critic I am, and unless I get something right, I feel very unhappy.
Michael Caine
#65. Books were my window on the world. Growing up at the Elephant and Castle, which was very rough, my paradise was the library.
Michael Caine
#66. I feel that I helped the working class by just saying there are no barriers, which I consider to be true.
Michael Caine
#67. I don't want to sound like Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells, but I do think there should be some sort of national service for young men.
Michael Caine
#68. I don't like getting up early in the morning and learning all that stuff. I work with offers that I can't refuse.
Michael Caine
#69. If you go away on location for three months and your wife stays at home, you've made a whole new load of friends and she's made a whole new load of friends and you get home and you're kind of strangers.
Michael Caine
#70. Be like a duck. Calm on the surface, but always paddling like the dickens underneath.
Michael Caine
#71. What a lot of people don't realize about gangs, in my opinion, is that a gang is not there to attack you. Eighty percent of the people in a gang are there to stop anyone from attacking them. You join a gang for protection, not to go out and hit someone.
Michael Caine
#72. I don't have any regrets because I'm very optimistic, and live each day as though it's the last.
Michael Caine
#73. You don't retire from the movies. The movies retire you.
Michael Caine
#75. That to me is what my idea of film acting should be. There shouldn't be any acting. You should just be watching a real person.
Michael Caine
#76. My career is going better now than when I was younger. Now I get the part. Back then, I'd get the girl.
Michael Caine
#77. You don't sacrifice your individuality; you sacrifice a lot of freedom.
Michael Caine
#78. I've never taken drugs - if you take a drug of your choice, you get some ecstatic feeling.
Michael Caine
#80. I love the start of autumn when the trees in my garden change the colour of their leaves in one last dazzling display.
Michael Caine
#81. I wouldn't make an anti-American film. I'm one of the most pro-American foreigners I know. I love America and Americans.
Michael Caine
#82. If you think you're going to be up for an Oscar, you schedule your moviemaking.
Michael Caine
#83. I don't do it often, but I do cry. I also laugh a lot; people tell me I'm funny and I do like to laugh.
Michael Caine
#84. And to Tom Cruise, for if you had won this, your asking price would have gone down so fast. Do you have any idea what supporting actors get paid? We get only one trailer, a small one, in the back.
Michael Caine
#85. I had an extraordinary belief in myself. For years people told me to give it up and even though I was poverty- stricken, I never thought I should give it up.
Michael Caine
#86. There are loads of black actors.You can't say: I'm going to vote for him, he's not very good but he's black, [so] I'll vote for him. You've got to give a good performance.
Michael Caine
#87. You can't get blase about something you haven't done yet.
Michael Caine
#88. I'm not in the Lifetime Achievement area yet-I'm still battling it out in the trenches.
Michael Caine
#89. In the sixties, everyone you knew became famous. My flatmate was Terence Stamp. My barber was Vidal Sassoon. David Hockney did the menu in a restaurant I went to. I didn't know anyone unknown who didn't become famous.
Michael Caine
#90. I enjoy making people laugh. The trick is to tell them jokes against yourself. If you praise yourself, your stories aren't funny.
Michael Caine
#91. You cannot have one bathroom. And it don't matter how much you love your wife and everything, 'cause you wind up with no room at all. You just get a little corner, and you've got a toothbrush and your paste and a shaving brush and a razor.
Michael Caine
#92. If someone is very upper-class, you have a stereotype of him which is probably true. If someone has a working-class accent, you have no idea who you're talking to.
Michael Caine
#93. To disappear your complete self into a character is quite difficult. I've tried it 85 times, and I've succeeded two or three times.
Michael Caine
#94. I'm very, very family oriented. I'm a big cook and a good connoisseur and I only drink very good red wines now.
Michael Caine
#95. There's quite a lot of bad stuff written about me. My wife even says a lot of bad stuff about me. But she is wonderful.
Michael Caine
#96. There is no point in competing with young talent ... I just concentrate on getting better each day.
Michael Caine
#97. I learned about life before I went into the theater, which is why I've been so happy. I was a soldier.
Michael Caine
#98. No matter what the reason, if you start to scream and shout, you look a fool, and you feel a fool, and you earn the disrespect of everyone.
Michael Caine
#99. A man's body may grow old, but inside his spirit can still be as young and as restless as ever.
Michael Caine
#100. I think life has got to develop as you get older, and I don't want to be wandering along doing the same old thing. I want more out of life.
Michael Caine
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