Top 100 Michael Douglas Quotes
#2. Everything's so repressive now - it's the No generation. You can't do anything, you can't eat anything, you have to abstain.
Michael Douglas
#4. I don't smile a lot in my pictures. I'm always so ... grim.
Michael Douglas
#5. There is something about seeing rhinos and lions running free that excites you. It's not that you feel afraid; it's more like you're liberated by seeing them.
Michael Douglas
#6. Wherever arms flow, violence follows. Bullets replace ballots as the solution to political disputes.
Michael Douglas
#8. I am a Jew. Those are four words of pride. My Jewishness is as deep as my genes.
Michael Douglas
#9. Greed is good! Greed is right! Greed works! Greed will save the U.S.A.!
Michael Douglas
#10. Sometimes we spend more efforts with people that are strangers in terms of making an impression than the person that's closest to us. And you just gotta remember not to take for granted that person that's closest to you.
Michael Douglas
#11. I don't think tongue cancer is the best cancer for an actor.
Michael Douglas
#12. The studios basically, besides developing some material, their strength is distribution. Distribution in any other business is a cost that you incur. You know, in a trucking business, you eat it. In a film business, distribution is a profit center.
Michael Douglas
#13. For an actor, it's great fun to play one of these hungry white sharks. Audiences love to hate them.
Michael Douglas
#14. 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest,' which my father had tried to get made for six, seven years, and I for four, was turned down by every studio. Every studio in the world had passed on it.
Michael Douglas
#15. Our economy is increasingly dependent on the success and integrity of the financial markets.
Michael Douglas
#16. I love kids, and I love having had this second chance to have a family.
Michael Douglas
#17. My marriage and my families come certainly before my career.
Michael Douglas
#18. Directing talent is very nebulous. You know, it's not in front of you like an actor's performance.
Michael Douglas
#19. I think the quality of television, given the amount of time you have, how short you have, is proportionally so much better than most movies.
Michael Douglas
#20. 'King of California' was just, I thought, a really great, fresh, original kind of script. I loved the tone, the mix of tragedy, comedy, and drama, and that it was a good part.
Michael Douglas
#21. Cancer didn't bring me to my knees, it brought me to my feet.
Michael Douglas
#22. Early on, someone had told me, 'You know, the camera can always tell when you're lying.' And, Jesus, that intimidated me. 'The camera can always tell? How am I going to do this?' Until one day I thought, 'Wait a minute, acting is lying. Acting is all about lying.'
Michael Douglas
#23. We must unite to make nuclear weapons a horror of the past.
Michael Douglas
#24. Cigar smoking by it's very nature is much more reflective than interactive.
Michael Douglas
#25. The one thing that men and women have in common - they both like the company of men.
Michael Douglas
#26. Serious is when they tell you, 'You've got cancer.' Cancer is serious, but then the rest of it is not.
Michael Douglas
#27. Capitalism is part of our system, but it's not for the faint of heart.
Michael Douglas
#30. The message from national security experts and citizens around the world is clear: The only way to eliminate the global nuclear danger is to eliminate all nuclear weapons.
Michael Douglas
#31. I don't know if likeable, pleasant characters have enough conflict for me to want to do them. I admire those people, but I've never been that kind of screen presence who can do nothing. I need to do something.
Michael Douglas
#32. You have to make entertaining movies. But like a good meal, it's nice to have a little food for thought after you walk out of the theater rather than just wiling away a couple of hours.
Michael Douglas
#33. I've always been somebody who, when I started a picture, never knew what the next picture would be.
Michael Douglas
#35. I'm a risk-taker. Most of my career has not been a joyful experience, but it has been challenging. I like the dangers.
Michael Douglas
#36. Like a lovely orchid, or anything else that's nurtured, marriage prospers and grows, but if it's ignored, it withers.
Michael Douglas
#38. When I go on a holiday to a tropical place, I'll spray tan before I go.
Michael Douglas
#41. Players never die - they just try their luck at another table.
Michael Douglas
#42. The people who work in Wall Street still look up to Gordon Gekko. He's sort of a guru.
Michael Douglas
#43. Even when you're acting with a producing hat, when you're in every scene, you're really conscious of trying to make everybody as good as they are, because ultimately you're trying to make the best movie possible.
Michael Douglas
#44. I've taken blame about being a bad father - if being a bad father is working your butt off trying to create a career at one time.
Michael Douglas
#45. Of course I feel blessed that I have a wife that is 25 years younger.
Michael Douglas
#46. In the movie 'Wall Street' I play Gordon Gekko, a greedy corporate executive who cheated to profit while innocent investors lost their savings. The movie was fiction, but the problem is real.
Michael Douglas
#47. You just have to know what your responsibility is to the movie, and live up to that, and be considerate of the other actors in the scene ... I have never been competitive in that way - I always want my leading ladies to be as good as they possibly can be.
Michael Douglas
#48. I was undeclared. I was in my third year of school. They said you have to decide upon a major, and my father was an actor. My mother was an actress. So, I thought theater might be the way to go.
Michael Douglas
#50. That's why I'm such a big sports fan, with sports you can never guess what's gonna happen. Most movies you get halfway through and you can kind of guess the ending.
Michael Douglas
#51. Of course it's important to make mistakes, as long as you grow from them.
Michael Douglas
#52. I went into rehab to save my marriage, but I wound up saving myself.
Michael Douglas
#53. I've always tried to kind of stretch my wings as an actor and do things that are different.
Michael Douglas
#55. My mother is Bermudan, so I had a lot of memories when I was a kid, used to go down to Bermuda a lot.
Michael Douglas
#56. When you've accomplished a certain amount in your career, you're not so focused on your ambitions.
Michael Douglas
#57. Chemotherapy takes its toll; the more you keep doing it, you lose your energy, and it gets more difficult to swallow.
Michael Douglas
#58. Since Catherine [Zeta-Jones] and I got together, I've cut back dramatically. My priorities changed, and I still love acting and all that, but not as much as I love watching my two kids grow up.
Michael Douglas
#59. I thought I could never be the actor Dad was, so I avoided it for a while.
Michael Douglas
#60. My entire career is contemporary based, not by choice, but just by character. So, all the movies I've done, except for one in 40 years, are contemporary. But I never did an effects movie. So, I'm also a producer and I was really curious about how this whole thing went together.
Michael Douglas
#61. With little knowledge of what it meant to be a Jew, I found myself passionately defending the Jewish people. Now, half a century later, I have to defend my son. Anti-Semitism, I've seen, is like a disease that goes dormant, flaring up with the next political trigger.
Michael Douglas
#62. All the pictures I do are contemporary. I've sort of discovered I haven't really been into science fiction or period pictures. And so, in that vein, psychological thrillers play a big part.
Michael Douglas
#63. When you are a celebrity, nothing remains secret for very long.
Michael Douglas
#64. I've never been one to carefully calculate my career decisions, to sit on the outside looking in. I go with my passion and what moves me.
Michael Douglas
#65. I have hardly ever worked with the same director twice. But when you have worked with a director before, you understand his behavior.
Michael Douglas
#66. It's difficult for me to meet women because my crowd is much older. I know that for some of the young women I do meet, a relationship with me can be envisioned as a benefit to their career.
Michael Douglas
#67. A lot of actors get concerned about their own image, even going so far as to rewrite a movie to best serve that image. All I want to do is be in good movies.
Michael Douglas
#68. For a long time, I can't say I was one who really enjoyed acting. I was always censoring it, or editing it, or analyzing it, rather than just going with it.
Michael Douglas
#69. My daughter is a horseback rider, so I try to watch her ride; we take holidays together.
Michael Douglas
#71. If your work isn't exciting, doesn't stir the emotions, where's the challenge? Where's the progress if you always play it safe?
Michael Douglas
#72. I've just kind of been used to carrying movies. I look back and I'm just used to being in every single scene in a lot of pictures.
Michael Douglas
#73. Directors have so much else to do besides tell actors what to do. There are so many issues and problems.
Michael Douglas
#74. It's a phenomenon that I see with young actors - a lot of American speaking parts going to British actors.
Michael Douglas
#77. Liberace was one of the biggest stars in America. He was a kind of a phenomenon.
Michael Douglas
#79. My dad was a movie star. Having that name was good and bad. People think it's a silver spoon. It's not.
Michael Douglas
#80. Most of the stories I read are about my Hollywood pedigree.
Michael Douglas
#81. It took me too long to realise that if you go to a marriage counsellor to resolve problems, it's in his interest to keep the marriage going.
Michael Douglas
#84. Actresses have more fear of being disliked. I, on the other hand, revel in it.
Michael Douglas
#85. Suddenly you've worked yourself up to the top of the pecking order and you say to yourself, okay, this is going to be fun.
Michael Douglas
#86. Actors, I have to say, most of the time, they elevate things; they don't screw things up most of the time.
Michael Douglas
#87. When I look at myself as a younger actor, I see what a tight ass I was. I had a pretty big shadow because of my father and the comparisons. I was self-conscious about that. Now I realize there was nothing to be worried about.
Michael Douglas
#88. Like my father, like most actors, I was a pretty ambitious guy.
Michael Douglas
#89. The thing with cancer is that you want to get it as early as you can.
Michael Douglas
#91. I'm impressed with the people from Chicago. Hollywood is hype, New York is talk, Chicago is work.
Michael Douglas
#92. I think sometimes in relationships, ladies like having a man who takes care of them, nurtures them. If you can't find it in a man your own age, you find it in somebody who is older.
Michael Douglas
#93. When I was working on pictures with my father, there were a couple leading ladies to whom I wish I'd expressed how I felt rather than being too cool or too shy.
Michael Douglas
#94. My movies are usually about stripping off the makeup, getting down to the skeleton.
Michael Douglas
#95. I believe there is a spirit within us, which we nurture based upon our efforts and what we bring to the world. But it doesn't come from the outside; it comes from the inside.
Michael Douglas
#96. When you're making pictures out of heartfelt passion, it hurts when someone calls them a calculated business move.
Michael Douglas
#97. I grew up on the East Coast and was going to go to an Ivy League School, but at the last minute I decided to be a hippy. It was the protest movements on the war, peace movements were going on at our university. It was a fantastic time.
Michael Douglas
#98. Cancer has shown me what family is. It showed me a love that I never knew really existed.
Michael Douglas
#99. I do think of myself as a bit of a loner, a bit of an independent. I'm one of those people who, when they're sick, like to curl up and remove myself. I don't like a lot of people around. There is nothing you can do to help.
Michael Douglas
#100. I don't know about Brad Pitt leaving that beautiful woman to go hold orphans for Angelina. I mean how long is that going to last?
Michael Douglas
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