Best 99 quotes of Val Kilmer on MyQuotes

Acting is not a science. Anybody who believes that their success exists in relation to their goals is deluding themselves; unless you think of a career in terms of financial goals. I have nothing against Tom Cruise, but he must have a large capacity to deal with the business side of movies.

Again, in Wag the Dog, war has to be declared by an act of congress. But if you go to war, you don't have to declare war. You're just at war and we did that, which is not legal.

A hundred million dollars in the art world is a substantial amount of cash to do anything.

A lot of old guys in movies are like cowboys - they talk like cowboys and they dress like cowboys.

Art is a way to get strength from something that is life-affirming. It can be quite violent and still be life-affirming.

A wonderful but kind of a terrible truth about acting is that you actually get to a point where you become content with an impossible task: it is really impossible to properly prepare. You kind of have to start over every time.

Being creative and making money in the theater is very challenging.

Big movies are fun and it`s great to fly on private jets and make a lot of money and all the things that are connected with Hollywood, but they take a lot of your own life.

Daryl Hannah likes to goof around with fashion, but she does have pretty impeccable taste.

Doing my first movie, I realized I could get into real bad habits. If you're the star, all you have to do is show up, and 20 people say, 'Do you want anything? What is it? Let me get it for you.' Believe me, you get spoiled very quickly. I saw some of my contemporaries allow themselves to have that fame, thinking they could handle it. It messed them up.

Everything in high school was reversed. If marijuana was supposed to make you mellow, I would be like, "The cops, the cops, the cops..." I was what you call the buzz kill.

Give me the compliments. I love compliments. I was born modest, but it wore off.

Gregory Peck was so charismatic. I saw a woman fall down - fall down! - when she saw him in a restaurant. And Brando. We were in London, and by then he was about 380 pounds. There was a gorgeous waitress, and off he went, in direct competition with me for this young girl's attention, speaking French, making her blush.

Hollywood is wonderful, but it does eat its young.

I can safely say that no one who has ever won an Oscar didn't want to win an Oscar.

I don't make any pretense about being normal. I'm not.

I don't believe in death. I think it's just a state of mind.

I don't think of my life as a cliche, but I'm a cliche eccentric. Complete with a strange name - I mean, who's named Val? How many Vals do you know? I mean, really?

I fell in love with the land and with the very old fashioned idea of leaving a physical legacy for my children. A stunning place, with a magnificent forest of trees, and a magnificent river.

If you know where your spiritual center is, and you neglect it, peace will always allude you.

If you look up the definition of news in the dictionary, it isn't what you watch on TV.

If you play Mark Twain and he's not funny, you are definitely not playing Mark Twain. That was the biggest challenge, in some ways. Writing and performing jokes that can come out of that brilliant delivery system he constructed: the friendly, avuncular truth-teller.

If you think that by threatening me you can get me to do what you want... well, that's where you're right. But - and I am only saying this because I care - there's a lot of decaffeinated brands on the market that are just as tasty as the real thing.

I have two children and they're young yet but all of the children that I know really inspire me.

I just don't think I've ever been comfortable at public functions and selling myself as an entity.

I learned a long time ago that place matters to me, on many levels, and maybe more than it should, but it is generally counter-productive for me to resist it.

I liked being Doc Holliday. It's fun to be insightful and aristocratic, to stand up for your friend and make sacrifices for him. It was fun to be arrogant like he was and have the goods to back it up. He was a very noble character. Although, let's not forget, he did kill a lot of people.

I love that Bob Dylan asked me to be in the first movie he wrote.

I'm a better person when I'm preparing for a role, when I'm studying a role.

I'm a character actor, but I look like a leading man.

I'm fairly sure I didn't show enough gratitude to my employers, and I'm sorry for that.

I'm going to put a museum on my ranch and people keep saying, "That's a huge idea." Yeah, it's big, but not bigger than the average big movie. A hundred million dollars in the art world is a substantial amount of cash to do anything. That's maybe a big gallery's total sales for a given year.

I'm not just an actor born in L.A. I was born in the Griffith Park Hospital. You can't get any more clichéd than that.

I never had a business plan. I did, actually - I'm lying. My business plan was to get lucky, and I did; that was great. And then my second business plan was to get lucky again, and there, I faltered.

In order to be an artist and an actor, like tackling the classics in the theater as well as film, there's lots of discipline, lots of work, physical work put in.

Interesting characters are troubled characters. The only problem I've had in my business is very few people - unfortunately, very vocal - confusing the difficult role that I play with me. I play these guys, but I'm not like them. I've been accused of being difficult to work with.

I probably complained more when I was younger. The movie industry can be frustrating but I think sometimes I could have been more helpful, approaching a film as a partnership rather than being critical of a director's ignorance. I wasn't sensitive to the fact that it's very hard to direct.

I respect people who can do both careers, like Will Smith and a couple of other people who have done it, but I just don't know when they sleep.

I sang the songs in 'The Doors'.

I saw the horizon. It's out there. And though I may not ever be able to touch it, it's worth reaching for.

I think death is just a transition to another state of consciousness.

I think spiritual perception comes from natural and healthy relationship to the land and I've had that. I get an easy, automatic sense of myself in nature, a wholeness and I feel nowhere else. I think people should live where praying is most immediate. That`s why I live in New Mexico. The physical terrain, the feeling, the environment and culture improve my life just by waking up there.

It hurts. I miss my kids. I miss my kids in so many ways that I can`t explain.

It is a weird thing that actors have people applaud when they're done working. I still find that entertaining.

It looked like it might not work out with Michael Keaton, so they asked Joel Schumacher, `Who do you want for Batman?` When he said me, I asked my agent, `Why? Who did they not get?` I`d met with Joel a couple of times before about other (movies). I didn`t know anything in terms of the cast, story or anything, but I said, `Sure, sounds like fun.` - On accepting his role as Batman.

It may or may not sound pretentious. But I`ve turned down, consciously and specifically, many jobs I knew would have been a pretty surefire way to go about making a lot of money, being recognized and gaining power in the industry.

It`s always been the same for me. I`ve always enjoyed acting, and I really love good actors; they`re such unique characters. I wish I could tell stories well, or tell a joke. Any time someone can do that it`s so satisfying. Sean Penn, for instance, is a really good actor, and he can tell a good joke or story. But it`s hard to do. Most actors have special talents that make them attractive, but they`re often odd characters.

It's a really weird thing, modern divorce. I found out I was getting divorced on television. That was kind of weird.

It seems to me that every step forward in my life has been one that brings me to a better understanding of this: that you do your thing every day the best that you can, and you approach any success at it with humility.

It's important to be yourself. What art does for everyone, helps you understand yourself and in a distilled way, whether it's a painting or a scene in acting or a joke. It distills something about everyday life that can be important to you.