George Clooney quotes:

I don't believe in happy endings, but I do believe in happy travels, because ultimately, you die at a very young age, or you live long enough to watch your friends die. It's a mean thing, life.

I bought a piano once because I had the dream of playing As Time Goes By as some girl's leaning on it drinking a martini. Great image. But none of it worked out. I can't even play Chopsticks. But I've got a nice piano at my house!

There is a strange pecking order among actors. Theatre actors look down on film actors, who look down on TV actors. Thank God for reality shows, or we wouldn't have anybody to look down on.

I think you should automatically donate your organs because that would turn the balance of organ donation in a huge way. I would donate whatever anybody would take, and I'd probably do the cremation bit.

In doing the screenplay for 'Good Night, and Good Luck,' the most important thing for me was to constantly go back to wherever the opposition would argue. So I had to keep reading all the books and articles about why McCarthy is such a good guy.

You have only a short period of time in your life to make your mark, and I'm there now.

In the '60s, when I was growing up, one of the great elements of American culture was the protest song. There were songs about the civil rights movement, the women's rights movement, the antiwar movement. It wasn't just Bob Dylan, it was everybody at the time.

After doing One Fine Day and playing a pediatrician on ER, I'll never have kids. I'm going to have a vasectomy.

On Christmas morning, before we could open our Christmas presents, we would go to this stranger's home and bring them presents. I remember helping clean the house up and putting up a tree. My father believed that you have a responsibility to look after everyone else.

If you're famous, I don't - for the life of me - I don't understand why any famous person would ever be on Twitter.

I've been my most happy and my most unhappy in relationships. I have family and friends and people I care very much about. I've got a really, really, really good life.

I can't give you 150 takes. I can't even give you 30 different ways of doing it! I don't have the talent or the range for it.

I probably wouldn't be a good spokesman for an electric car, because I'll still get on a private jet, and one flight on a private jet undoes all my electric-car good deeds.

The people I've respected most in the industry over the years - Paul Newman, for instance. I just loved the way he handled growing old on-screen. It's understanding that you're now basically a character actor. Which is fine, but you have to pay attention to it.

I don't care. Charlton Heston is the head of the National Rifle Association. He deserves whatever anyone says about him.

It's not that I lead this oblivious life where I think I've got such a great personality that people want to spend time with me. If someone has a poster of you or asks for your autograph, clearly you can't take them out on a date. It's not that interesting if someone is just interested in you.

I'd think, 'In a relationship, we should never have his kind of fight.' Then, instead of figuring out how to make it work, I looked for a way to get out of it. The truth is, you shouldn't be married if your that kind of person.

My biggest fear is doing the same things 10 years from now. That would be a failure. It's something you have to constantly reassess, and asking yourself what you are going to do next makes it a good, long full journey.

My grandparents back in Kentucky owned a tobacco farm. So, to make money in the summer, we could cut and chop and top and house and strip the tobacco.

The problem is, we elected a manager and we need a leader. Let's face it: Bush is just dim.

The simple truth is that everyone has an opinion, everyone has the right to voice it, and they should if they want to.

I know what my limitations are as an actor, but my strength is putting myself into a well-written part. When I get in trouble is when I have to fix it, or when I have to carry it on personality.

When you're young you believe it when people tell you how good you are. And that's the danger, you inhale. Everyone will tell you you're a genius, which you are not, and if you understand that, you win.

I don't go on that many dates, because the truth is, anytime you go out in public with a girl when you're well-known, there are pictures of you everywhere, and it's like you're a thing.

I think one of the major misconceptions about me is that I live my life the way people think I lead my life, with hot and cold drinks running everywhere and a party all the time. They think of my life in terms of certain excesses that don't really exist. Things are actually fairly simple.

You don't want to try to look younger, because you'll look wrong. You dye your hair, you look wrong. You wear a bad toupee, you look wrong. You wear makeup to hide things, you get your eyes done, you look wrong.

My father was and is a great journalist. Thirty years ago, I was studying broadcasting in college, and the problem was I wasn't nearly as good as my father. I wasn't as quick or as smart as my old man, and I realized it would be a long time before I was ever going to be, and I decided to do something else.

Most of the films I've done haven't done particularly well. I'm surprised I'm continuing to work.

I just think there are a lot of celebrities who don't feel that they have a voice. A lot of actors come from a place of fear, and that's just a general statement about actors. You're terrified the casting director won't like you, you're terrified the producer won't like you, you're terrified the director won't like you, and on and on.

The first thing that I learned - and I understood it at a really young age - was that I could get a laugh. Really early. Because my mother and father are funny.

Shutting down the government is not how you make government work.

I think the reason why a lot of young people are such screw ups... is oftentimes they didn't have the luxury I had of forming important relationships and opinions and life experiences before having success.

My life isn't focused on results. My life is really focused on the process of doing all the things I'm doing, from work to relationships to friendships to charitable work.

You have to remember that in the microcosm of Cincinnati, Ohio, through northern Kentucky, my father was a big star, still is. So that made my sister and me really visible. Everybody knew us, talked about us.

I love children and I get along with them great. It's just that I believe if you're going to be a parent, there has to be something inside you that says, 'I want a family.' I don't feel that sense of urgency.

Having 'Oscar winner' on your tombstone is a great thing.

I'm a Method actor. I spent years training for the drinking and carousing I had to do in this film.

An acting career usually has about a shelf life of ten years before people get sick of seeing you. It's a good thing to have a job to fall back on and I really do enjoy directing.

I don't know if winning at any cost is wrong or not. There are times I've thought that the end justified the means.

There is something very unsettling about being with someone when they die. People say it's peaceful. It's not peaceful. It's the most personal thing you can do, is die, and you feel almost like you're invading someone's most personal moment by being there.

Growing old on screen is not for the faint of heart.

I've walked with very famous people down red carpets over to the crowd of thousands of people, and you'll reach out to shake their hand and they've got a camera in their hand. And they don't even get their hand out, because they're recording the whole time.

I believe in all the qualities of being a liberal. I keep going back to all the great social events in our country's history, starting with the Salem witch trials, where the conservative view was that they're witches and should be burned at the stake, and the liberal view was there's no such thing as witches.

I grew up in the world of bad television, on my dad's sets and then as a young schmuck on dating shows and so on.

But I'm kind of comfortable with getting older because it's better than the other option, which is being dead. So I'll take getting older.

I'm kind of comfortable with getting older because it's better than the other option, which is being dead. So I'll take getting older.

If people see me having dinner with a beautiful woman, they immediately believe that I'm having a love affair with her. Of course that's rubbish. I'm not a playboy!

I grew up in a family of storytellers, but Google has destroyed us because you can fact-check everything. We'd always like the stories to be a little better than they were.

I'm certainly the last person to give advice on, well, anything.

You never really learn much from hearing yourself talk.

Who would name their kid Jack with the last words 'off' at the end of the last name? No wonder that guy is screwed up.

I've been lucky enough to do a few films that will last longer than an opening weekend and those films are the ones I'm proud of.

I had to stop going to auditions thinking, 'Oh, I hope they like me.' I had to go in thinking I was the answer to their problem.

I'm the least metrosexual cat you've ever met. I've never had my fingernails or toenails done, and I've cut my own hair longer than other people have cut my hair.

After a while, you just want transportation, and things like cool cars or motorcycles are all about getting attention. I get all the attention I could ever need, so I kind of like being in a minivan and people not paying so much attention to me.

Hollywood still makes things. We still export a couple billion dollars' worth of product overseas. Original, new product. Some people might not agree that it's original or new, but basically it is.

There's no connection between al-Qaeda and Iraq.

Run for office? No. I've slept with too many women, I've done too many drugs, and I've been to too many parties.

It's incredibly unfair. You don't see a lot of 60-year-old women with 20-year-old men onscreen.

There's a certain cruelty to being on a big screen as your eyelids start to sag and your hair falls out and turns gray that you either have to be able to handle or not. What you can't do is try to force yourself into roles that you could have played or would have played ten years earlier.

I've been working with Pat Robertson on Africa debt-relief, and we disagree on virtually everything except certain very specific, inalienable rights, and the truth is that morality and patriotism come in all shapes and sizes.

When you first start out, you are just happy to get a job, any job. And as time goes on, either you move forward or screech to a halt.

I don't tweet, I don't go on Facebook. I think there's too much information about all of us out there. I'm liking the idea of privacy more and more.

I was in a bar and I said to a friend, 'You know, we've become those 40-year-old guys we used to look at and say, 'Isn't it sad?'

I've had some success at writing and directing, and I like it. It's infinitely more creative than just acting, and I have things I want to say and do.

In the time that we're here today, more women and children will die violently in the Darfur region than in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Israel or Lebanon. So, after September 30, you won't need the UN - you will simply need men with shovels and bleached white linen and headstones.

At some point in our lifetime, gay marriage won't be an issue, and everyone who stood against this civil right will look as outdated as George Wallace standing on the school steps keeping James Hood from entering the University of Alabama because he was black.

I don't mind what they say as long as they're not being mean.

Bush, Sharon, Blair and Rice are names that history will damn.

I'm only two years older than Brad Pitt, but I look a lot older, which used to greatly frustrate me. It doesn't anymore. I don't have to fit into that category and get trounced by Tom Cruise and Brad.

They say I was a bad Batman, that it was my fault, that I buried the franchise. But the truth is, it was a big project. I was pretty intimidated in that world. I did the best I could in the situation I was given.

As time goes on and you become more comfortable in your career path, and things are starting to make sense, and it's not just about work, you find that you're able to focus on other things and other people.

As a director, I do very few takes, because I feel like you hire the right actor and they'll do the job right. And the directors that I've worked with and had the best luck with - Jason and [ Steven] Soderbergh and the Coen brothers - all have been that kind of director.

It is not lost on me that I'm spending my honeymoon at Comic Con.

What did Bush do on 9/11? He ran away and hid. Even Reagan knew more about leadership than that, and he was as bad a symbol of America as I can think of, off-hand. But at least he's been in enough cowboy movies to know he had to come out and stand on top of the rubble and be seen shaking his fist or something.

Things hurt me now. My knees hurt, my back hurts. But your head still thinks it's twenty-three.

Peace is a fulltime job. It's protecting civilians, overseeing elections, and disarming ex-combatants. Peace, like war, must be waged.

The script for this film was written 52 years ago by Edward R. Murrow, who taught us many valuable lessons about responsibility and always, always questioned authority, because without it authority often goes unchecked.

The only failure is not to try.

I'm the flavor of the month.

Anytime there's an actual grassroots movement that isn't funded by people trying to create a grassroots movement, I find that interesting.

I love my grey hair and wrinkles. I love the fact that my face has more of an edge and more character than it did when I was in my twenties and thirties. No Botox for me.

The idea that every time you do a film you're supposed to be tortured confuses me. I mean, guys who say, 'Oh, it's really tough, my character is really suffering' -come on. For us, even in the rotten ones we've had a good time. I don't think you have to suffer.

The first question is something immediate -- and immediately, we need humanitarian aid to be allowed into the Sudan before it becomes the worst humanitarian crisis in the world.

I've met my bride-to-be in Italy and I will be married in Italy soon, in a couple of weeks. In Venice of all places! In closing, I guess what I would like to say is to my bride-to-be, Amal, that I love you very much and I can't wait to be your husband.

I'm a liberal. I'm confused when that became a bad word...

Ides of March' I did for scale - scale as a director, scale as an actor, scale as a writer.

You learn from the mistakes you make and from the mistakes other people make. The truth is, you don't learn from success; you learn from failure.

I know love at first sight can work. It happened to my parents.

I don't remember who wins awards [Oscars]. I've won a few but what I really remember are movies. I love films, so I'm not concerned about speculation about winning things because I really enjoy being in films that last longer than an opening weekend. That's my goal in life.

Both of my grandparents died of lung cancer. So I got quite a lesson in the payback later in life of smoking, and if you keep it up how bad it can be.

I enjoy going on motorcycle trips and stopping in small towns and enjoying drinks with the locals.

The best advice I got from my aunt, the great singer Rosemary Clooney, and from my dad, who was a game show host and news anchor, was: don't wake up at seventy years old sighing over what you should have tried. Just do it, be willing to fail, and at least you gave it a shot. That's echoed for me all through the last few years.

I enjoy living in a nice house and having a nice life. So I do two or three commercials overseas a year to sort of fill in, because they pay pretty well.

I didn't have time. I was too busy breaking up Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman's marriage. (on rumours he was responsible for Julia Roberts and Benjamin Bratt's break-up)

All I will say is we get wiser as we get older. And that what I am looking for in life is the same as I always have; happiness, peacefulness and joy. And that's all I'm going to say about that because otherwise I'd get into trouble

I don't like to share my personal life... it wouldn't be personal if I shared it.

The government itself is running exactly like the Sopranos and they sit back and they make deals. And they say okay, 'I'm going do this: France, you're getting the pipelines.'

What I try to do is make sure that the directors I'm working with are on the same page and want to do the same kind of films. You can really protect yourself as an actor if you work with really good people. It can hide a lot of flaws along the way.

I doubt anybody gets taken seriously for very long. I'll be on some reality show in about six years going, Hey, I had a great year in 2006.

The truth of the matter is the real story are the people who rise above all of this incredible cruelty. Otherwise that cruelty wins.

It's not that your back hurts, .. You get these horrible, ice cream brain-freeze headaches. So I would go in on the weekends and get these things called blood patches, where they'd shoot blood into your spine. It was like running a marathon to get it done.

Fame can be very dangerous, because you can start to enjoy that part of it. And that's not the good part of what I do for a living. The good part is the making of films. The unpleasant part is the fame part, if you're not careful.

I've certainly done some turkeys along the way and made some dumb choices in my career, mostly early on. I'm one of the lucky ones who got to make a lot of mistakes very early when no one was paying attention.

You never really learn much from hearing yourself speak.

I'm not out trying to prove anything. I'm sort of finished with that, so I get to play in other sandboxes and try and figure out what I like and I'm interested in.

I had my Aunt Rosie, who was famous and then not, so I got a lesson in fame early on. And I understood how little it has to do with you. And also how you could use it.

I find that as you get older, you start to simplify things in general.

There's a funny thing about fame. The truth is you run as fast as you can towards it because it's everything you want. Not just the fame but what it represents, meaning work, meaning opportunity. And then you get there, and it's shocking how immediately you become enveloped in this world that is incredibly restricting.

I think it's the most responsible thing you can do, to have kids. It's not something to be taken lightly. I don't have that gene that people have to replicate.

When you see Hitler burning paintings by Salvador Dali and Picasso he's telling you that this time period and these men and this culture didn't exist, and I've seen that happen in other countries, Sudan for instance, it's not enough to kill them you have to destroy all of their markings that they left that was their history.

I had a Tesla. I was one of the first cats with a Tesla. But I'm telling you, I've been on the side of the road a while in that thing.

I'm really white trash.

My father taught me about having principles and how to treat people with respect. My aunt also taught me how to keep a perspective on everything that happens to you. So you learn to be humble and not take your success for granted.

On an awards-show day, I can play basketball, go in, take a shower and put on a tux - it takes me three minutes to put on a tux - and be out the door in 15 minutes.

I watch 'Batman & Robin' from time to time. It's the worst movie I ever made, so it's a good lesson in humility.

As you get older and ease your way into being a character actor you have to be comfortable with where you are in life and career, and I'm very comfortable with what I'm doing - working on projects I'm proud of.

The loneliest you will get is in the most public of arenas: You will go to a place and end up in the smallest compartment possible, because it's a distraction to everybody, and you end up not getting to enjoy it like everyone else.

One of my favorite films is 'Big Fish,' which I think is a masterpiece.

I do happen to have a good life... But I also like to work. I feel like I got the brass ring and I got very lucky in this.