Best 165 quotes of Jack Nicholson on MyQuotes

Age is the first limitation on roles that I've ever had to encounter, and I hit that awhile ago.

A lot of people in the middle of their lives have a secret yearning for more romance.

A lot of people manage to find common ground and not let disagreements or tensions build up and destroy them, and other people break up or get divorced. I don't think anything is ever going to change that situation. You simply try to find an accommodation and an understanding with another person and work from there.

Always try in interviews to avoid the cliches about the problems of public life.

A man needs a private life. With no ability to have a private life, one thing leads to another, and before you know it we have Bill and Monica. We need to get real about things. Humans are humans. Why should we expect more?

As an actor, I want to give in to the collaboration with the director because I don't want my work to be all the same. The more this can be done with comfort, the more variety my work has had.

At 55 I said the probability is I won't have another relationship. I just didn't want to start another family. Between my own bizarre criteria and taste and the fact that I'm not available for many things I thought it was unlikely. Once you know the science about it, I don't think anybody should consider being committed to a real eternal relationship until you're through something called the infatuation circle.

Because of the way the business is structured, I have sometimes turned down scripts that I might otherwise have accepted had I known who was directing them.

Before I moved into the mainstream of American movies, I wrote a script as an experiment. I wanted to get very far away from the clichés about the three-act play - structure, development.

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.

Children give your life a resonance that it can't have without them.

Comedy is more difficult. You can look at scenes when you're doing a drama like, “Maybe it works,” but in comedy, when you're doing it, either it works or it doesn't. You have to keep doing it until it does, and the requirement is more.

Comedy is much harder, it's a lot more exacting. You can't just be real and you can't just use the same kind of techniques you use to fill up a regular scene.

Decent people shouldn't live here. They'd be happier some place else.

Do you think God knew what he was doing when he created woman?

Early on, if I was alone two three nights in a row, I'd start writing poems about suicide.

Even in the most sophisticated person, it is the primitive eye that watches the film.

Everybody said I was good, but being known and not having a big film success is almost tougher than being completely new. It just kind of turned my life around and was definitely a highlight.

Everybody's old enough for a beer, ain't that right, Mule?

Financially, I've lost money and made money, but I know my way around financially.

For a long time, I was afraid to be alone. I had to learn how to be alone. And there are still times when I think, Uh-oh! I gotta talk to somebody here or I'm gonna go crazy! But I like to be alone. Now I do. I really do. There's a big luxury in solitude.

For an actor, style comes last. You first have to implement the whole thing, but your style comes from the subconscious, which is the best part an actor brings to his work.

Freedom in every sense but primarily political sense, a rise in repression that stems from a repression of sexuality. It's AIDS, it's herpes, it's this, it's that. Ask any saloon owner what's happened to social life in America in the past 12 years and they'll tell you it's a different world and these people are strongly misinformed by the media, peer pressure.

Have you ever danced with the Devil in the pale moonlight?

Having kids is the most innately positive thing that anyone can do.

He [Castro] is a genius. We spoke about everything.

How would I like to be seen? Very endearing, charming, intelligent, handsome.

I am in an age group where it is rude to discuss money, and now it is all anyone cares about.

I assume most of the characters I play are exactly like me.

I began to think that the finest modern writer was the screen actor. This was in the spirit of the Fifties where a very antiliterary literature was emerging - Kenneth Patchen and others. I kind of believed what Nietzsche said, that nothing not written in your blood is worth reading; it's just more pollution of the airwaves.

I believe in making all movies at their most reasonable. That I get a lot of money as an actor is because nobody else will get it if I don't.

I can't hit on women in public any more. I didn't decide this; it just doesn't feel right at my age.

I certainly knew my father. He just didn't happen to be my biological father.

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.

I'd give my goddamned soul for just a glass of beer.

I don't believe in God now. I can still work up an envy for someone who has a faith. I can see how that could be a deeply soothing experience.

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.

I don't have any fear of intimacy, but rather thrive on it, which is rare in a public person.

I don't have any plugs or tucks but people do what they want. I look at it as mutilation.

I don't know if this is a true statistic, but I heard somewhere that there are three times as many single women over forty as single men. That's what we got from the women's movement. The chickens have come home to roost.

I don't play golf competitively. I tell everybody that I cheat so they won't gamble with me. That's why you can't watch football. Everybody's gambling. They don't want to watch the game; they watch the spread.

I don't remember if I've been asked seriously to direct a picture. I understand that. I'm very good business for people as an actor and perhaps they'd rather I didn't.

I don't want to direct a movie as good as Antonioni, or Kubrick, or Polanski, or whoever. I want it to be my own. I think I've got the seed of it and, what's more, that I can make movies that are different and informed by my taste.

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.

I'd prefer if people had no impressions of me. As a kid, I had to tell my own family, "Please, just don't talk about me!" Because they always got it wrong. Always. I just didn't want them to tell anyone anything about me.

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.

I envy people of faith. I'm incapable of believing in anything supernatural.

I feel very lucky because I don't think there's any part I can't play. There are parts that scare me more than others.

If it is difficult to know yourself as an individual, it seems to be more complex as a couple. So if you say, "Oh I like a person who is like this and that," you might take away the possibility of seeing the only one that might be right for you.

If I were an Arab-American, I would insist on being profiled. This is not the time for civil rights. There are larger issues for Americans.