Top 100 Quotes About Sean Penn
#1. Sean Penn's really the only one stupid enough to put anything down on paper.
Trey Parker
#2. As a kid, as a young actor, I really wanted to pop. I wanted to create something different. I wanted to be Sean Penn, but I didn't have all the words to be Sean Penn. But I was trying to do something different in every role.
Matthew Lillard
#3. I don't speak for all Libertarians any more than Sean Penn speaks for all Democrats.
Penn Jillette
#4. I have no desire to ever talk to Sean Penn.
Trey Parker
#5. As an actor, Sean [Penn] is brilliant. And he's really an excellent director, as well. We got along really well.
Vilmos Zsigmond
#6. There's no way you ask Sean Penn a question and then, you're gonna be HUGE !
Louis C.K.
#7. There's lots of incredible roles out there that I'd love to tackle, but there's a select group of actors I find myself gravitating towards, like Philip Seymour Hoffman or Sean Penn or Daniel Day-Lewis - real transformational actors.
Derek Magyar
#8. Even though I wanted to be John Malkovich or Sean Penn when I was a kid, mostly I was a music nerd.
Justin Kirk
#9. I had an existential crisis at the Oscars, sitting next to Sean Penn and Meryl Streep, and being like, 'What am I doing here? I don't belong here'. I felt like it could all be taken away.
Amy Adams
#10. Daniel Day-Lewis and Sean Penn to me are the two best actors of all time. I'm just glad to have the pleasure to be in an era that they're acting while I'm acting. They're probably the best actors in my mind.
Channing Tatum
#11. I'm challenged by people like Russell Crowe and Sean Penn who come in with such incredible discipline and power.
Josh Lucas
#12. I like men who are very cool but who are also so brilliant that they are almost insane. Sean Penn, Gary Oldman, Bob Dylan, Tom Waits - men who would be flipping burgers if they hadn't found an outlet for their brilliant mind-sets.
Jolene Blalock
#13. Oscar nominations came out today. Up for best actor, Sean Penn for 'Mystic River,' Jude Law for 'Cold Mountain,' and of course, George W. Bush for 'Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction.'
Jay Leno
#14. I've always been drawn to stories involving brothers, which started with my first viewing of Sean Penn's, 'The Indian Runner.' This subsequently lead to my working with my two brothers, Scott & Brad. I couldn't imagine a greater gift in the business.
Dean Winters
#15. When I did Sean Penn's movie, I think I was living in, like, a $500-a-month room, and someone called me up or bumped into me and asked me if I'd come up to work for a day. That sort of got me going a little bit. But it wasn't until Sin City [2005] that I kind of got back into the game.
Mickey Rourke
#16. People still remember Sean Penn as Spicoli from 'Fast Times At Ridgemont High,' and if I can have, like, one-10th of his career, then I'm fine.
Christopher Mintz-Plasse
#17. With Sean Penn, he wants to be surprised. He doesn't necessarily want what he's written, although we'll do what he's written. He likes the danger of acting.
David Morse
#18. There's an old joke that politics is Hollywood for ugly people. An awful lot of the press coverage about Washington reads like coverage of Hollywood. Madonna is having some spat with Sean Penn. Who cares? And who cares which politician is mad at that politician?
Ted Cruz
#19. I have great respect for Sean Penn. It's like most relationships that fail. It's not one thing, it's many thing that go on over a period of time.
Madonna Ciccone
#20. When I was a teenager, the actors I was really into were Mickey Rourke and Sean Penn. I saw 'Rumble Fish' on my 16th birthday, and around the same time, it was 'Falcon and the Snowman' and 'Bad Boys' from Sean Penn.
Aidan Gillen
#21. I'd love to work with Sean Penn or Kevin Spacey.
Devon Bostick
#22. The thing I tried to remember when I was younger was 'Do something that's at least as good, if not better, than the last thing you did.' So I started with Brian De Palma and Sean Penn. I had a pretty high bar to start with.
John C. Reilly
#23. There's a way to do an acid trip like Harold & Kumar, and there's a way to be on acid. What I know of acting, Sean Penn actually strapped up to that (electric) chair in Dead Man Walking. These are the guys that I look up to.
Shia Labeouf
#24. Sean Penn, for his acting as well as his writing and directing. There are so many actors I respect, but his reach is so wide.
Boyd Holbrook
#25. Sean Penn has announced his retirement from acting about 72 times.
James Gray
#26. I'm crazy about the Coen brothers, I'm crazy about Sean Penn. I love the usual suspects like Susan Sarandon, Meryl Streep and people like that.
Jacki Weaver
#27. One of the great "theologians" of our time, Sean Penn, put it this way: "When everything gets answered, it's fake. The mystery is the truth."21
Rob Bell
#28. My heroes are Robert Duvall, Forest Whitaker, Ed Harris, Tommy Lee Jones, Anthony Hopkins and Sean Penn.
Walton Goggins
#29. U.N. weapons inspectors found empty chemical warheads in Iraq. So, the question everyone is asking now is how did Sean Penn miss this?
Jay Leno
#30. I want to be host of 'SNL.' I want to work with Steven Spielberg, Leonardo DiCaprio, J.J. Abrams, Emma Stone and Tim Burton, Sean Penn, Cameron Crowe. I want to work with Adam Sandler - he is so funny - and Tina Fey and Amy Poehler.
David Mazouz
#31. I look at actors like Johnny Depp, Sean Penn, and Benicio Del Toro, and they play all these different characters. I'm hoping that, in my lifetime, I'll be able to look back and say, 'You know what? I did all these different characters, and I enjoyed every single film I did.'
Efren Ramirez
#32. I don't see any negativity with what Brad Pitt is doing with his Make It Right Foundation, or what Sean Penn is trying to do in Haiti.
Spike Lee
#33. A lot of people will say, "Oh, I got into acting because I wanted to explore my craft." They're a bunch of liars, unless they're Sean Penn, DeNiro or my dad. For the rest of us it was all about chicks and money.
Charlie Sheen
#34. De Niro was a hero of mine. And Sean Penn. But I've realized I can't operate at that level of intensity. That's okay for movies. On TV, when you live with horror day in and day out, you have to protect yourself.
Christopher Meloni
#35. I heard about the project over a year before we began. My American agent said, 'Oh, you might want to read 'In Cold Blood' because they're talking about you for Capote, but the script's with Johnny Depp and Sean Penn at the moment.' So, these things take their time to dribble down the food chain.
Toby Jones
#36. That was madness. You're never going to bring one of those down with a handgun.
Sean Penn
#37. In school, I was a genius of the year preceding the year I was in, every year.
Sean Penn
#38. Marriage ain't easy, but it's great most of the time.
Sean Penn
#39. 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.
Sean Penn
#40. Anger can be a problem, but it has tremendous potential, too. It's just figuring out what to do with it.
Sean Penn
#41. We've let the blade of our innocence dull over time, and it's only in innocence that you find any kind of magic, any kind of courage.
Sean Penn
#42. I had a house burn down once, and everything in life burned, except my family, and it was so liberating. I didn't have a bad moment about it. It sort of reinvigorated my interest in a lot of things.
Sean Penn
#43. All I need are some tasty waves, a cool buzz, and I'm fine
Sean Penn
#44. I think life's an irrational obsession.
Sean Penn
#45. At this stage, what would be rewarding would be for audiences to want to watch.
Sean Penn
#46. I like to believe that love is a reciprocal thing, that it can't really be felt, truly, by one.
Sean Penn
#47. My favorite thing to do is not act - it's that simple.
Sean Penn
#48. Child-rearing is my main interest now. I'm a hands-on father.
Sean Penn
#49. I live in the energy and rhythm of the character. To some degree, that's true of every actor I've worked with.
Sean Penn
#50. The one thing you can count on in Hollywood - across the board - is cowardice.
Sean Penn
#51. I love acting, truly my favorite people are actors.
Sean Penn
#52. I'll tell you what I probably would prefer to happen less and less: actors that I know and respect in shampoo ads. Or modeling.
Sean Penn
#53. In between, I go broke because I seem to do movies where you're not paid a lot as an actor.
Sean Penn
#54. Well, look at all of these summer blockbusters. You can't help but laugh a little, because you've already seen a lot of these movies 482 times.
Sean Penn
#55. Craft comes into acting later rather than sooner. I was somebody who had to learn through a process - a natural actor doesn't need to.
Sean Penn
#56. Fulfilling what you start is why you start something.
Sean Penn
#57. Hal Holbrook was in one of my first television movies when I was about 18 or 19. He'd made such a strong impression on me and a lasting one in terms of what being an actor was.
Sean Penn
#58. There is no shame in my saying that we all want to be loved by someone. As I look back over my life in romance, I don't feel I've ever had that.
Sean Penn
#59. There is a strength of character in the people who have, by and large, never experienced comfort.
Sean Penn
#60. You try to do your best at what you're getting paid for.
Sean Penn
#62. So if we have anything original to offer, it's to speak from our own life about the society we're in.
Sean Penn
#63. Whatever one considers art to be, there is in many people a hunger to express themselves creatively and to feel authentic in doing that.
Sean Penn
#65. You're always having to live more to fuel something new. It's an obligation to yourself and to the audience. The personal baggage that comes with being a known actor just adds to that struggle.
Sean Penn
#66. Well, I think that when you direct a movie or write it. And in the case of the two movies I did, I wrote and directed, they occupy a special place for you.
Sean Penn
#67. There is a kind of sense of truth and reconciliation that is non-formalized, but it's understood and accepted. Haitians are Haitians and there is an inherent loyalty that forgives an awful lot.
Sean Penn
#68. And dressed her [Madonna] up like a turkey. After I read that stuff, I thought long and hard about what one would do to dress someone up like a turkey. And I nailed it. I figured you've got to get out the Playtex glove, blow it up and put the glove over the head.
Sean Penn
#69. There is no re-inventing the wheel.
Sean Penn
#70. 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.
Sean Penn
#71. I love stories about people who are smart enough to know that what they're doing is destroying them, but that knowing that doesn't help them.
Sean Penn
#72. The thing that's very close in the process is writing and acting, not directing. Directing's very different.
Sean Penn
#73. Beauty doesn't ask for attention
Sean Penn
#74. 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.
Sean Penn
#75. Somewhere along the line, the actions of this government are the actions of me.
Sean Penn
#76. I've been a road-rat since I got my driver's licence at 16, so I've probably gone across America 20 times.
Sean Penn
#77. That difference do you think you can make, one man in all this madness?
Sean Penn
#78. The major studios are by and large banks, and they give you what is by and large a loan to make a movie. Like banks, they want their money back plus.
Sean Penn
#80. Turning one's back on stardom might be the highest form of common sense. One that I would aspire to be more complete with.
Sean Penn
#81. My greatest interest in it was certainly not to avoid those things that were going to be controversial about the family but the interest I had in the story was predominantly what he was pursuing and not as much what he was fleeing.
Sean Penn
#82. Haiti, like any place, has its security problems; it has a great challenge in terms of establishing a kind of globally acceptable rule of law.
Sean Penn
#83. I think we all have light and dark inside us.
Sean Penn
#84. The advice you give to young directors for sure is to go out and become some version of a successful movie actor. Do that first and say yes to people like Terrence Malick and Clint Eastwood and Woody Allen when they come and offer you movies. It's a great front row seat to filmmaking.
Sean Penn
#85. Yeah, I had actually tried to stop acting before I made Dead Man Walking.
Sean Penn
#86. Oh, I'm a big-mouth. I said a lot of things.
Sean Penn
#87. 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.
Sean Penn
#88. 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.
Sean Penn
#89. I just want real creative freedom without worrying about, you know, car payments.
Sean Penn
#90. When everything gets answered, it's fake.
Sean Penn
#91. When I go to bed at night and I think of humanity at large, I think of all those things.
Sean Penn
#92. I've always operated under the notion that audiences don't always know when they're being lied to, but that they always know when they're being told the truth.
Sean Penn
#94. The bottom line is, you love your wife, you do your best with that.
Sean Penn
#95. Venezuela and its revolution will endure under the proven leadership of Vice President Maduro,
Sean Penn
#96. I don't have any particular excitement about working with any specific director or actor at this point.
Sean Penn
#97. There are a few directors around who I have some excitement about spending my $7 at the theatre watching their movies.
Sean Penn
#98. 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.
Sean Penn
#99. That on a romantic level, if you feel it about somebody and it's pure, it means that they do too.
Sean Penn
#100. I don't consider myself specifically political, you know? I think of working as an actor as being a human thing. The concerns I have that fall into politics are human concerns.
Sean Penn
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