Quotes from Michael Caine

I try to make everyone around me feel comfortable.

I'm every bourgeois nightmare - a Cockney with intelligence and a million dollars.

You have to remember, I never became successful or wealthy till I was 30.

It's a lesson in life—don't look back, you'll trip over.

Wherever I live, if there isn't a restaurant I want to go to of a certain type, then I open it. That's all. For selfish reasons.

If you're a movie actor, you're on your own - you cannot control the stage. The director controls it.

I'm trying to work only with established, respected directors. I took a lot of bad scripts and worked for a lot of lazy directors, and it was discouraging to go to the screenings and see that the director had added nothing, the editor had added nothing, there was nothing to see.

I think what is British about me is my feelings and awareness of others and their situations. English people are always known to be well mannered and cold but we are not cold - we don't interfere in your situation. If we are heartbroken, we don't scream in your face with tears - we go home and cry on our own.

I think life has got to develop as you get older, and I don't want to be wandering along doing the same old thing. I want more out of life.

What a lot of people don't realize about gangs, in my opinion, is that a gang is not there to attack you. Eighty percent of the people in a gang are there to stop anyone from attacking them. You join a gang for protection, not to go out and hit someone.

To me, 'Educating Rita' is the most perfect performance I could give of a character who was as far away from me as you could possibly get and of all the films I have ever been in, I think it may be the one I am most proud of.

I started with the firm conviction that when I came to the end, I wanted to be regretting the things that I had done, not the things I hadn't.

But the whole point of the Sixties was that you had to take people as they were. If you came in with us you left your class, and colour, and religion behind, that was what the Sixties was all about.

I'm forever testing myself. As a person and as an actor, I have no sense of competition.

I never bring a role home with me. The moment they say, 'It's a wrap,' it's gone completely. I'm a totally ruthless professional, and life is my family, not my work.

My view of actors is that basically they're all harmless lunatics who'd be on the psychiatrist's couch, except that we get this sort of catharsis every six months or so, and we go and be absolutely someone else.

You cannot have one bathroom. And it don't matter how much you love your wife and everything, 'cause you wind up with no room at all. You just get a little corner, and you've got a toothbrush and your paste and a shaving brush and a razor.

Books were my window on the world. Growing up at the Elephant and Castle, which was very rough, my paradise was the library.

I think I have the secret of a successful L.A. restaurant, especially now that so many Europeans live there. You have to have a place where they can see out the windows, see the world passing by. Europeans fancy that.

Presenting the Oscars was the most nerve-racking job I have ever done in show business. It's very much a live show: they have comedy writers waiting in the wings, and as you come off between presentations, they hand you an appropriate gag to tell.

English is clipped in speech. Texas is exactly the opposite.

The first thing I'll do if I want to look really crappy is, I don't wear any makeup at all.

I had been nine years in the theatre and hadn't had massive success. My only thing was I wanted to be an actor and I didn't care when, where, or how much for.

I did everything. I ran my life exactly as I wanted to, all the time. I never listened to anybody. I'm pig-headed.