Top 100 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. You can call me Joker. And as you can see, I'm a lot happier.
Jack Nicholson
#3. There are short parts that I as an actor am very right for. Or I just like the part. Or you need someone like me for the movie. By that I don't mean at the box office, I mean in the execution of the material.
Jack Nicholson
#4. Watching TV Mum said, 'Do you miss your dad?' and I said, 'Who?
Louise Rennison
#6. My wife always says that I will be stuck with this forever: I am the difficult one. With Jack Nicholson they always said it was drugs. Warren Beatty is supposed to have screwed everything that jumped off the curve. I'll tell you, in reality a few of us had as many girls as Warren.
Dustin Hoffman
#7. Just as the people who lived through the Second World War thought different things on different days, I think everybody who goes through that period carefully now thinks different things on different days.
Nicholson Baker
#8. I walked out and Jack Nicholson was sitting about six feet away, so I avoided that area and I looked up at the balcony in the back and sang the song.
Elliott Smith
#9. 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
#10. I'm suspicious of full-replacement programs - that is, pronouncements that one way of doing something will entirely supplant another, and that in fact we have to hurry the replacement along.
Nicholson Baker
#11. The fuel for the sports fan is the ability to have private theories.
Jack Nicholson
#12. Many good poets are really essayists who write very short essays.
Nicholson Baker
#13. Just because you're perfectionist doesn't mean you're perfect.
Jack Nicholson
#14. Everybody's old enough for a beer, ain't that right, Mule?
Jack Nicholson
#16. I am like the Jack Nicholson of the Kings - every single game. If there was a game tonight I wouldn't be here. I used to play hockey. That was my original thing. My first thing, I wanted to play professional hockey.
Rob Zombie
#18. Some of the greatest actors have turned superheroes into a serious business: Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson in 'Batman'; Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart, the first venerable knights of the X-Men, who have now passed the baton to Michael Fassbender and James McAvoy.
Tom Hiddleston
#20. 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
#21. I can't hit on women in public any more. I didn't decide this; it just doesn't feel right at my age.
Jack Nicholson
#22. I like to not care that much about criticism, but I do care about it.
Jack Nicholson
#23. Always try in interviews to avoid the cliches about the problems of public life.
Jack Nicholson
#24. The beast for me is greed. Whether you read Dante, Swift, or any of these guys, it always boils down to the same thing: the corruption of the soul.
Ben Nicholson
#25. Well, a girlfriend once told me never to fight with anybody you don't love.
Jack Nicholson
#26. I think the Greeks invented sports as an antidote to philosophy. In sports there are absolute rules. It's not, What about this? What about that? Either you're safe or you're out. It's ten yards or it's not. It's in the hoop or out of the hoop. It's certain.
Jack Nicholson
#27. 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest' is a movie that I just find flawless. Jack Nicholson ... I just saw 'The Shining' again the other day; he's so brilliant. He's such a brilliant actor, just unbelievable.
Michael Biehn
#28. I'm just interested in meditating on certain ideas, and I like to draw: that's my way of thinking.
Ben Nicholson
#30. I guess this proves there are as many nuts in the Academy as anywhere else.
Jack Nicholson
#32. I've always had lots of friends who share my perspective - I guess you could say that I'm a guy who aggressively pursues his happiness.
Jack Nicholson
#33. Having said that, I'm a huge Jack Nicholson fan because he just goes nuts in everything he does. Having Jack in his heyday would also be a dream come true.
Paul Kane
#34. Take characters that Nicholson or De Niro play: they're not always tough.
Tom Berenger
#35. Charlize Theron and Cate Blanchett are very good actresses.
Jack Nicholson
#36. You have to suffer in order to be a human being who can help people understand suffering.
Nicholson Baker
#37. Take caution in your tone, commander. I'm a fair man, but this
heat is making me absolutely crazy.
Jack Nicholson
#38. While I was writing I assumed it would be published under a pseudonym, and that liberated me: what I wrote was exactly what I wanted to read.
Nicholson Baker
#39. My mother never saw the irony of calling me a son of a bitch
Jack Nicholson
#40. There was a period when I just wanted to make what I wanted to make and I didn't care what lie I had to tell.
Jack Nicholson
#41. I have always had the deepest respect for Bill Nicholson as a person and as a manager. The Spurs boss is an honest Yorkshireman and you will go a long way before finding a straighter character than that. Bill has never wavered in his determination to give White Hart Lane fans the best.
Bill Shankly
#42. I sort of understood that when I first started: that you shouldn't repeat a success. Very often you're going to, and maybe the first time you do, it works. And you love it. But then you're trapped.
Jack Nicholson
#43. Your own exploration therefore has to be personalized; you're doing it for yourself, increasing your own store of particular knowledge, walking your own eccentric version of the city.
Geoff Nicholson
#44. He [Castro] is a genius. We spoke about everything.
Jack Nicholson
#45. Go sell crazy someplace else; we're all stocked up."
(Melvin Udall aka Jack Nicholson, 1997)
Jack Nicholson
#47. We live, we die, and the wheels on the bus go round and round.
Jack Nicholson
#48. I'd give my goddamned soul for just a glass of beer.
Jack Nicholson
#50. The function of a great library is to store obscure books.
Nicholson Baker
#51. If you're going to write, write one poem all your life, let nobody read it, and then burn it. This is very young thinking, I confess, but it is the seminal part of my life.
Jack Nicholson
#52. Then the weeks rolled by in a sinister psych ward haze filled with white-coated orderlies and rocking whack-job patients torn straight from some old Jack Nicholson film, all anti-psychotic meds and padded lonely cells ...
Shannon Celebi
#53. When I was 23, I went to work for Jack Nicholson reading scripts. Later, I was married to a production designer named Richard Sylbert. So I lived in Los Angeles for ten years.
Susanna Moore
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. I come from the Lynchs of Sligo. You know, I went there, but I looked in the phone book and there are nine million Lynches in Sligo.
Jack Nicholson
#57. The blues and jazz will live forever ... So will the Delta and the Big Easy.
Jack Nicholson
#58. Believe it or not, I supported Richard Nixon on the issue of presidential privilege. How could anyone conceive of being the president of the United States and think that every single thing that you say or do can become a part of the public record? It just seems so stupid to me.
Jack Nicholson
#59. I've spent more time playing golf than anything else the last 18 years. Just wanted to be an 80s-shooter. Got there, too.
Jack Nicholson
#60. When I came up, guys like Nicholson and DeNiro were held in highest regard.
Peter Gallagher
#61. You can't say, "I'm gonna make a hit movie." You're as dead as you could be.
Jack Nicholson
#62. I have mainly been interested in acting. I think it's a great job, a fine way to live your life.
Jack Nicholson
#63. New Jersey is a great place to live. And we have given some of the best talent to the world, from Jack Nicholson, John Travolta, to Jerry Lewis to Bon Jovi to Frank Sinatra.
Queen Latifah
#64. With my sunglasses on, I'm Jack Nicholson. Without them, I'm fat and 60.
-Jack Nicholson
Jack Nicholson
#65. 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
#66. I am as I am. The world is as it is. Whether I am content with that has very little to do with it.
William Nicholson
#67. The less people know about me, the easier my job is.
Jack Nicholson
#68. I have never felt brutalized as an actor. Many actors do, some times, but I've never had that experience. If I'm not happy with the balance, I just won't work with that person again.
Jack Nicholson
#69. Jovan: "I'll pass any test you present me. I assure you."
Eviona: "I wonder what the best test of pride would be."
Eve S. Nicholson
#70. If you can avoid the grammatical bog of trying to wow English professors with your sentences, then you're well on your way to getting the reader to turn one page and then the next.
Scott Nicholson
#71. 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
#72. canoe is the most graceful, the most sensitive, the most inexplicable contrivance of man. With its paddle you may dip up stars along quiet shores or steal into the very harbor of dreams. I
Meredith Nicholson
#73. And of course to work with Jack Nicholson and Diane Keaton, and work with a wonderful, beautiful script directed by Nancy Meyers, it was really for me a dream come true.
Keanu Reeves
#74. To put it another way, pain is God's megaphone to rouse a deaf world. Why must it be pain? Why can't he rouse us more gently, with violins or laughter? Because the dream from which we must be wakened, is the dream that all is well.
William Nicholson
#75. It always bothered me when people came off stage and were told how great they were. They weren't, really, in my opinion. It was then I started thinking that, contrary to conventional wisdom, film was the artful medium for the actor, not the stage.
Jack Nicholson
#76. I'm a New Wave baby, so I got very stimulated by foreign film.
Jack Nicholson
#77. 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
#78. Student journeys which were important to me were Sicily, Greece, and Egypt, where I really saw these buildings, and that is where you're able to grasp what things mean.
Ben Nicholson
#79. I was very shy and somewhat awkward. I studied too hard. And to have this exciting dorm life was a whole new thing.
Nicholson Baker
#81. I was particularly proud of my performance as the Joker. I considered it a piece of pop art.
Jack Nicholson
#82. The music wasn't going to happen, and I realized I had read so little. I didn't know my way around any century. I was very under read.
Nicholson Baker
#83. When I left school I went on trip around the world - I only got as far as Australia, but like a bloody fool I cut it short because of a girl. It's probably one of my big regrets in life.
Ben Nicholson
#84. Even in the most sophisticated person, it is the primitive eye that watches the film.
Jack Nicholson
#85. I've been in movies with Meryl Streep, Jack Nicholson - but I was on 'The Simpsons,' and finally, in the eyes of my children, I was a star.
Ed Begley Jr.
#87. The job of the novel is to be true to the confusion, but not so confusing that you turn the reader off.
Nicholson Baker
#88. There is no way you can get people to believe you on screen if they know who you really are through television.
Jack Nicholson
#89. I admire James Franco. I admire somebody like Jack Nicholson. Anyone who just does movies for the sake of making movies and takes big risks.
Jack Kilmer
#90. All my tips and tricks and woes and worries are gong to come tumbling out before you. I'm going to divulge them. What a juicy work that is, 'divulge.' Truth opening its petals. Truth smells like Chinese food and sweat.
Nicholson Baker
#91. There is no good word for stomach; just as there is no good word for girlfriend. Stomach is to girlfriend as belly is to lover, and as abdomen is to consort, and as middle is to petite amie.
Nicholson Baker
#92. You only lie to two people in your life, your girlfriend and the police.
Jack Nicholson
#93. One's head is finite. You pour more and more things into it - surnames, chronologies, affiliations - and it packs them away in its tunnels, and eventually you find that you have a book about something that you publish.
Nicholson Baker
#94. Very rarely are we directing or cutting someone elses boards. We concept, direct, shoot, animate and edit almost everything that comes through here.
Ben Nicholson
#95. In fact, you could make the argument that a historian like Shlomo Aronson does in passing in one of his books, that the bombing campaign united the German nation behind Hitler, and actually contributed to the sustaining of his power.
Nicholson Baker
#96. I've never lost a friend over work. I come from a small-town environment and I remember my childhood impressions that, if you were a conniver or a fink or whatever, everybody knew about it and you were a louse for the rest of your life. So I never lost those values in some way.
Jack Nicholson
#97. 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
#98. I keep thinking I'll enjoy suspense novels, and sometimes I do. I've read about 20 Dick Francis novels.
Nicholson Baker
#99. I have never lied to you, I have always told you some version of the truth.
Jack Nicholson
#100. In the movies, every crazy old fart needs a cool old car. Jack Nicholson drove a spiffy yellow 1970 Dodge Challenger two-door in 'The Bucket List.' In 'Gran Torino,' the cranky pensioner played by Clint Eastwood not only owned a 1972 GT Sport, he also used to build cars like that at the Ford plant.
Richard Corliss
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