Quotes from Mickey Rourke

I trained like an animal, but the thing is focus and concentration. When the bell rings it's like when the little red light goes on over the camera. And I can usually nail my lines on the first or second take because I'm right there.

People are always afraid of the truth.

When you lose everything, and I mean everything, you sit there in this empty room in the dark, and the only person who can get you out is you.

Years ago I realized that maybe I made mistake, politically, when I turned a lot of that stuff down. I would go off to obscure places and make movies that six people went to see.

It was the most fun I've ever had on a movie. It was one of the happiest times in my life. I was living in New York, and I really enjoyed acting at the time. Also, it's funny because that was also the time when I went downhill.

It's no fun being a loser. Trust me.

I had some things I had to fix. It took me 14 years to do it. But it was never really fun back in the day to work with directors who were a lot older and were like authoritarian and talking to you like that.

The ladies love me and I love the ladies!

I always knew I'd accomplish something very special - like robbing a bank perhaps.

I spent a lot of years trying to beat the system and, in the end, the system kicked my behind good.

Comeback is a good word, man.

I don't mind getting punched in the nose by a guy standing in front of me. It's getting stabbed in the back that I can't handle.

Women are much stronger than men. When a woman says enough is enough, which means enough is enough. Man will always lie at her feet in the hope of return. I was lying. And somehow happy.

What I've got to do now is let them judge me for who I am as an actor and not for my notoriety.

When I first met Alan Parker, who directed 'Angel Heart,' he'd heard so many horror stories about me that he was literally scared to death of me. Right away, he sat me down and said, 'I'm very scared of you. I've heard you're a very bad boy.'

Usually if you read a screenplay, no matter who's writing it, the bad guy is always written as a one-dimensional bad guy.

I'm an old broken down piece of meat and I deserve to be all alone . . .

I still work out most days. When I do it, I go full blast five or six days a week, two to three hours a day. I enjoy it. It's therapeutic for me.

Being out of work for 13 to 15 years is no walk in the park.

It's the formulaic studio movies the make money, and when they do, the actors in them are automatically movie stars.

All I am hoping for is to be able to work-I think my best work is still ahead of me-I think all that I have been through in the last several years have only made me a better, more interesting actor.

I don't have many Hollywood friends anyway; I thought with my ability I didn't need to make those kind of relationships, but maybe I should have done. Might have made my life easier!

I started to shortcircuit because I had high aspirations for the film. I never told anybody that.

My dogs are more important than my family.