Quotes from Sean Penn

In between, I go broke because I seem to do movies where you're not paid a lot as an actor.

You try to do your best at what you're getting paid for.

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.

When you act in a film, you're inevitably surrounded by people you didn't choose, right down to the set painter. I like being able to pick the family I'm waking up to in the morning that's going to make this group effort to tell a story that applies to what's interesting to me at that stage in my life.

The bottom line is, you love your wife, you do your best with that.

I'm not a breakfast eater.

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.

'The Indian Runner' was easy. It had been incubating in me for eight years, and by the time I sat down to write the thing, I had all the pictures in my head.

That difference do you think you can make, one man in all this madness?

I can make a better living as an actor than I can as a director. Though I certainly would prefer to be directing movies.

I'm not going to have a better day, a more magical moment than the first time I heard my daughter giggle.

There's not a lot of good movies being made.

I think if you want good things to happen for a country like Haiti, then you need to provide the circumstances where the Haitians can do that.

I'm a huge Woody Allen fan. Good movie, bad movie, it doesn't matter - I just like his movies.

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.

I think you start to prepare the minute you read something.

I think we all have light and dark inside us.

I live in the energy and rhythm of the character. To some degree, that's true of every actor I've worked with.

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.

What happens is things come to you - director, script - and if you respond to it, it's because it's tapping into some part of what's inside you, and different roles tap into different parts.

So if we have anything original to offer, it's to speak from our own life about the society we're in.

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.

There is no re-inventing the wheel.

The thing that's very close in the process is writing and acting, not directing. Directing's very different.