Jack Nicholson quotes:

When I am cast in a movie where I feel that the woman's part is more interesting, I usually start thinking about Spencer Tracy and Fred Astaire. They seem to be the most clear actors when working with women.

There's only two people in your life you should lie to... the police and your girlfriend.

In my last year of school, I was voted Class Optimist and Class Pessimist. Looking back, I realize I was only half right.

You only lie to two people in your life, your girlfriend and the police.

It's not like I'm starved for company - I have a few very good lady friends - but there's only a certain amount of times a woman wants to see you and never go out for dinner.

I never had a policy about marriage. I got married very young in life and I always think in all relationships, I've always thought that it's counterproductive to have a theory on that.

Well, a girlfriend once told me never to fight with anybody you don't love.

If I go into a restaurant there's a very good chance that I'm going to spend my time being the mayor. If I want to have a good time, I'm happier having dinner here.

Beer, it's the best damn drink in the world.

I don't think many people have a very good understanding of leisure and the importance it plays in our lives.

When I was in high school, I earned the pimple award and every other gross-out award.

I'll tell you one thing: Don't ever give anybody your best advice, because they're not going to follow it.

One of my school friends' parents owned a minigolf course, and a bunch of us kids would play there all day in the summer. Two-under deuces was a good score.

In other words, I wouldn't like to be an actor if I could only be real. I like to get wild, behaviorally wild, and it's crazy to think of any form where it's just one way.

Played tennis for years. But you can't improve at tennis after you're 50. You get to be in your 40s, and suddenly you're a doubles player.

I like to not care that much about criticism, but I do care about it.

Early on, if I was alone two three nights in a row, I'd start writing poems about suicide.

There were points in my life where I felt oddly irresistible to women. I'm not in that state now and that makes me sad.

We are going as fast as we can as soon as we can. We're in a race against time, until we run out of money.

I'm not hard to get along with.

The average celebrity meets, in one year, ten times the amount of people that the average person meets in his entire life.

There's a period just before you start a movie when you start thinking, I don't know what in the world I'm going to do. It's free-floating anxiety. In my case, though, this is over by lunch the first day of shooting.

Frankly, I got into the movies because I like the movies a lot.

Age is the first limitation on roles that I've ever had to encounter, and I hit that awhile ago.

I am a person who is trained to look other people in the eye.

Acting is everybody's favorite second job.

I'm not a power person. I like everyone to be on an equal footing.

I've always thought basketball was the best sport, although it wasn't the sport I was best at. It was just the most fun to watch.

I know I can act. There aren't too many other jobs I know how to do.

I don't want people to know what I'm actually like. It's not good for an actor.

My whole career strategy has been to build a base so that I could take the roles I want to play. I'd hate to think that a shorter part might not be available because I was worried about my billing.

I certainly knew my father. He just didn't happen to be my biological father.

In this industry, there are only two ways up the ladder. Rung by rung or claw your way to the top. It's sure been tough on my nails.

I'm against cronyism, and I had to learn that early on. Like, I don't have an entourage, because I saw the negative effects of those things.

The blues and jazz will live forever... So will the Delta and the Big Easy.

I love discourse. I'm dying to have my mind changed. I'm probably the only liberal who read Treason, by Ann Coulter. I want to know, you understand? I like listening to everybody. This to me is the elixir of life.

How would I like to be seen? Very endearing, charming, intelligent, handsome.

With my sunglasses on, I'm Jack Nicholson. Without them, I'm fat and 60.

Once you've been really 'bad' in a movie, there's a certain kind of fearlessness you develop.

There has long been a bemoaning of the lack of opportunity to make films that are anything but explosions or the ladling on the pea soup or whatever you want to call it. You can hardly make a movie where somebody isn't a murderer or a rapist or, if it's a "Fried Green Tomatoes" that isn't some wistful thing on this, that or the other thing.

I hate giving advice, because people won't take it.

You can't handle the truth!

No issue is more compelling than the air we breathe, be it hot or cold, be it hawk or human.

The way I reacted to 9/11 was I decided I didn't want to do any movies that are sad or critical. I decided I didn't want to make my living depressing people or making them go home sick, so I just decided I wanted to do comedy for a while and study it for a while. It doesn't mean everybody should do that, but that was my reaction.

I'm in the movie business; it's meant to be very cutthroat. But you won't find anybody that ever says I cheated them or manipulated them.

I would never want to vilify somebody who considered abortion murder. I was an illegitimate child myself. I may not have existed today.

I began to think that the finest modern writer was the screen actor. This was in the spirit of the Fifties where a very antiliterary literature was emerging - Kenneth Patchen and others. I kind of believed what Nietzsche said, that nothing not written in your blood is worth reading; it's just more pollution of the airwaves.

My point of view, while extremely cogent, is unpopular. . . . That the repressive nature of the legalities vis-a-vis drugs are destroying the legal system and corrupting the police system.

I resist all established beliefs. My religion basically is to be immediate, to live in the now.

I've never lost a friend over work. I come from a small-town environment and I remember my childhood impressions that, if you were a conniver or a fink or whatever, everybody knew about it and you were a louse for the rest of your life. So I never lost those values in some way.

I think that's what distinguishes Schmidt, really. In the movies now, so much of what is appealing to an audience is the dramatic or has to do with science fiction, and Schmidt is simply human. There's no melodrama; there's no device, It's just about a human being.

People who speak in metaphors should shampoo my crotch.

There's probably no one who understands Method acting better academically than I do, or actually uses it more in his work. But it's funny - nobody really sees that. It's perception versus reality, I suppose.

I was invited to join the MGM cartoon department. But if I'd started work in animation I'd have had to take a cut in salary, so I didn't.

I wasn't a babe in the woods. I'd watched a lot of stars, from James Dean to Brando, and I'd seen everybody alive work at MGM. I had a certain old-timer's quality, even though I was young and new, and drew on what I believed before I made it.

If it is difficult to know yourself as an individual, it seems to be more complex as a couple. So if you say, "Oh I like a person who is like this and that," you might take away the possibility of seeing the only one that might be right for you.

Have you ever danced with the Devil in the pale moonlight?

I don't have any plugs or tucks but people do what they want. I look at it as mutilation.

My motto is: more good times.

I'm the age where we didn't have television as kids. So when I saw my nieces and nephews watching Howdy Doody, Kukla, Fran and Ollie, and so forth, I thought the world had gone mad.

I have never lied to you, I have always told you some version of the truth.

I guess this proves there are as many nuts in the Academy as anywhere else.

Because you know, down deep in my heart, when all is said and done, I still live under the illusion that basically people think of me as an up-and-coming young actor.

I'm a New Wave baby, so I got very stimulated by foreign film.

my mother never saw the irony of calling me a "son of a bitch

Freedom in every sense but primarily political sense, a rise in repression that stems from a repression of sexuality. It's AIDS, it's herpes, it's this, it's that. Ask any saloon owner what's happened to social life in America and they'll tell you it's a different world and these people are strongly misinformed by the media, peer pressure.

Well, I'm not going to sit here and pretend that I haven't been a rogue most of my life.

We learn how to kiss, or to drink, talk to our buddies-all the things that you can't really teach in social studies or history-we all learn them at the movies.

And this, incidentally, is my thumbnail sketch of American marriage: A woman sees a man; she likes him. Now she jumps on this thing and rides it to some kind of standstill. Then she changes it and trains it, and to the exact degree that she's able to do this, she disrespects him.

Staying together is a challenge. We all have to accept qualities in other people that aren't always exactly what we want or need.

Because of the way the business is structured, I have sometimes turned down scripts that I might otherwise have accepted had I known who was directing them.

The camera photographs what's there.

I only take Viagra when I'm with more than one woman.

Just let the wardrobe do the acting.

When we make mistakes they call it evil. When God makes mistakes they call it Nature!

I'm definitely still wild at heart.

What's beautiful is all that counts, pal. That's all that counts.

I always knew there wasn't going to be anybody to help me and emotionally support me, that whatever I did I'd have to do on my own.

A star on a movie set is like a time bomb. That bomb has got to be defused so people can approach it without fear.

Well, a younger woman is a type, but not necessarily a type for me. And what is a younger woman? I mean, I'm pretty old. Almost everyone is younger.

I would never complain about my life, even though I really would like to have a mate.

When I come up against a director who has a concept that I don't agree with, or maybe I just haven't thought of it or whatever, I'd be more prone to go with them than my own because I want to be out of control as an actor, I want them to have the control, otherwise it's going to become predictably my work, and that's not fun.

I worry from the moment I take a job. I worry about how I'm going to do it, if I can do it... Then I walk on set and the director says, 'Roll', and all of a sudden, all of it disappears and it's all happening, and I relax, and I'm doing what I do, and I'm not even thinking about it.

Once you've been really bad in a movie, there's a certain kind of fearlessness you develop.

I'm a good friend.

I don't have any fear of intimacy, but rather thrive on it, which is rare in a public person.

I'm an actor who they said was wrinkled and balding and everything else when I was in my early 30's. Most of the people who wrote that who thought they were younger than me are now bald and wrinkled.

If you get an impulse in a scene, no matter how wrong it seems, follow the impulse. It might be something and if it ain't - take two!

I can't hit on women in public any more. I didn't decide this; it just doesn't feel right at my age.

Almost everybody's happy to be a fool for love.

I'm Irish. I think about death all the time.

The minute that you're not learning I believe you're dead.

When they say I'm a great actor, I close my ears because it's not good for you to think that way.

Human beings are always going to find interesting ways of making a mess of their lives. It's human nature.

The less people know about me, the easier my job is.

I learned a long time ago in Hollywood that the only person I should vote for is myself.

I usually don't get too bogged down with my personal problems because that's a one-way street if you get yourself into a negative frame of mind and only see the dark side of life.

I'm very contra my constituency in terms of abortion because I'm positively against it. I don't have the right to any other view. My only emotion is gratitude, literally, for my life.

Children give your life a resonance that it can't have without them.

You know, I think I understand what you're like now. You're very beautiful and you think men are only interested in you because you're beautiful. But you want them to be interested in you because you're you. The problem is, aside from all that beauty, you're not very interesting. You're rude, you're hostile, you're sullen, you're withdrawn... oh, I know- you want someone to look past all that at the real person underneath. But the only reason anyone would bother to look past all that is because you're beautful. Ironic, isn't it? In an odd way you're your own problem.

Through all permutations and youthful poetry, I came to believe that the film actor was the great "literateur" of his time.

It's very easy to go down, so always live up. Incline yourself upward.

Comedy is much harder, it's a lot more exacting. You can't just be real and you can't just use the same kind of techniques you use to fill up a regular scene.

Before I moved into the mainstream of American movies, I wrote a script as an experiment. I wanted to get very far away from the clichés about the three-act play - structure, development.

Men dominate because of physicality, and thus they have mercy where women do not.

I assume most of the characters I play are exactly like me.

Women -- a mistake, or did He do it to us on purpose?

You can follow the action, which gets you good pictures. You can follow your instincts, which will probably get you in trouble. Or, you can follow the money, which nine times out of ten will get you closer to the truth.

I love the company of people. I always have and always will, it comes with my family. But earlier in life I might have got a little nervous if I was alone for a day or two in a row. I might think, "Where are they?" Now, I just go on doing naturally what I do.

I've never been able to say I've been influenced by a list of artists I like because I like thousands and thousands and I've been influenced in some way by all of them.

I don't want to be a product of my environment. I want my environment to be a product of me.

I think human beings have a basic instinct to be free and explore their world in their own way. I've always been driven to look at life as something which we should try to plunge into rather than sit back. You have to be able to have fun and keep creating a sense of excitement to how you approach the world.

A lot of people in the middle of their lives have a secret yearning for more romance.

I've always had lots of friends who share my perspective - I guess you could say that I'm a guy who aggressively pursues his happiness.

I've always had an urge to feed my need to have fun and feel free. I don't see any interesting alternatives.

Once you've started a film you don't become a wet noodle. You must have that conflictual interface because you don't know, and they don't know. It's through conflict that you come out with something that might be different, better than either of you thought to begin with.

If you want your freedom, you have to be willing to work hard to exercise it.

I've always fought against being controlled and manipulated and stomped upon by circumstances.

Everyone pretty much acknowledges that he's the man, and I still feel that underrates him.

If you think you're attractive, you're always attractive.