Quotes from Nicolas Cage

I've gotten pretty good at leaving characters on the set. I go home and try to relax and regroup and be ready for the next day.

I don't want a perfect character, I want a character who has, as strange as it sounds, some humanity, some flaws, some needs.

I'm going to steal the Declaration of Independence.

I think what makes people fascinating is conflict, it's drama, it's the human condition. Nobody wants to watch perfection.

The movies I cannot go without and that I watch annually are 'A Clockwork Orange,' 'Scarface' and 'Fantasia.'

My father once said, 'If you're in the desert and you're dying of thirst, are you going to drink a glass of blood or are you going to drink a glass of water?' I think what he was trying to say, interesting coming from my blood father, is sometimes there are people in your family that can be toxic.

I care about the connection with the audience. Film is such a powerful medium. Movies can change the way people think.

I'll speak for myself, but there's a lot of humor to be found in sarcasm and darkness. You talk to any paramedic, they survive by developing a pretty off-kilter sense of humor.

At a young age, I was interested in comic books, which was really how I learnt to read. The name Cage came from a comic book character called Power Man.

I got a little tired of movies where I had to shoot people. I got to thinking about the power of film and what that power is. The power is in fact that it really can change people's minds.

I don't want to sit around by the pool luxuriating with a margarita. That's just not what I want to do.

When I was eight, I would look at the cover of the 'Ghost Rider' comic book in my little home in Long Beach, California, and I couldn't get my head around how something that scary could also be good. To me it was my first philosophical awakening - 'How is this possible, this duality?'

I have a love/ hate relationship with the city of New Orleans, which is the strongest kind of relationship.

Guy Pearce is very precise and clear about understanding the rhythm and the music of a scene.

In this day and age, where you have a lot of comic book movies made every day, and most of them are really good boys, it's important to have a couple bad boys out there, too.

When I act, I hear it like music. In my head, I hear the dialogue like music.

You can choose your family sometimes. You can choose people, it could be a teacher, it could be a professor, it could be someone you work with that actually genuinely cares about you and wants you to succeed.

I like fantasy. I like horror, science fiction because I can get avant-garde with those performances in those movies.

I'm a seeker. I'm very much a believer in science. But I do think there are times when science and mysticism intersect.

Science fiction is a way that I can go into the abstract, go into the imagination, and audiences are still willing to go along for the ride.

I think it's no secret that I've tried to take chances in my career and also in my life, and I believe to not live in fear.

Personally, my interests are ancient history and ancient civilizations. In my own life, I'd like to go to places like Easter Island.

When I'm in England, I know I'm a visitor, but being a white man in England with ancestry that's German and Italian, I have a history with the Romans and the Saxons. I feel some connection and ancestry here, as weird as that sounds.

Someone like Vincent Price or somebody like Christopher Lee, they never won an award, and it doesn't matter. They're cool.