Mickey Rourke quotes:

A couple of guys won Academy Awards for the things that I turned down. Today, after coming to terms with everything, after being in therapy for a long time-there are areas where I will compromise.

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.'

Bounty hunters these days - because everything is so sophisticated with computers and surveillance, it doesn't have to be a one-man-army-type guy who goes in and kicks a door down.

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.

The hardest thing in life to do is to change.

Wrestling and boxing is like Ping-Pong and rugby. There's no connection.

Where I come from, being a hard man is being able to take a good beating and then get back up again and carry on fighting.

I never look backwards. I have always been an athlete. I boxed before I acted.

You want to earn respect in your old age. You want to walk into a restaurant and have people say: 'There's Mickey Rourke. He was great in 'The Wrestler.' You don't want them jumping out of windows.

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

I had a bonding problem when I went off and boxed for five years. I was over in Europe and Asia fighting because I wanted to do something different; I was tired of acting. But the thing is, when I was done doing that, I couldn't get a job.

As time goes by and you're getting older and stuff like that - getting older sucks. You know, I hear all this crap about, 'Oh, you can age with dignity.' Really?

Mitch Glazer and I went to high school together, and his mother was my English teacher for two years. She was my favorite teacher, and I followed Mitch's career as a journalist, so we've kind of kept in touch over the years.

I used to love playing football in high school. I played with the same guys for 10 years.

Winning an Oscar ain't about performance. There's a lot of politics involved.

Comeback is a good word, man.

When you're young, working in a warehouse or selling hot dogs, you look at work - at acting - as something precious. It gets you out of the stink.

Some of your worst gangsters are guys who were very low-key.

I behaved worse than anybody for 15 years, and you have to pay the price for that. I used to blame other people, then therapy made me realise I had to change.

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

You know, back in acting school they always teach you, 'Make bold choices and look for activities that are interesting.'

I love the first Godfather movie, part one. And two.

Very few men can fall as far as I have and come back. People see me and it's like they've seen a ghost, like I'm back from the dead.

A lot of the stuff I am now seeing is edgy, raw kinda material.

I had a lot of anger inside me and that came out at times that were not particularly advantageous to me career-wise.

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

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.

In Hollywood, you're always playing roles... It's like going through the motions. But in real life, it's like, you gotta take care of business. It's not just the movies.

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.

My dogs are more important than my family.

I spent so long studying really hard to become a fine actor, but threw it all away because I got the adulation and the fame so easily.

I come from a violent background. So I became hard. I realised that I had made myself that way to deal with a feeling of abandonment and shame.

I get a call, and it's Howard Bingham, and he's got the champ on the line.Muhammad Ali didn't remember me from being a kid, but he was going, "Yeah, you're in bed, and you want your mama with you . . ." It really helped so much. He spent 15 or 20 minutes on the phone with me. That's a memory that I'll always cherish.

I have so many boxing gloves around my house that I would get them confused with other gloves.

Actors should shut up about politics. They tend to be ill-informed finger-pointers who just cosy up to some flavour of-the-month liberal.

I was very ashamed of seeing a therapist because I thought only crazy people went, and then, after about nine years, I asked him, 'Well, was I really crazy?' And he nodded and said, 'You were but not any more.'

All that prosthetic makeup drains you. By the time it's lunch, you're done.

I was very immature when I was young, and for me there was no balance. Everything was just all or nothing.

Julian Schnabel painted a picture that he dedicated to my character in Rumble Fish. It was called The Motorcycle Boy. I remember when he brought it over to me at the Mayflower Hotel [in New York] years ago. This is when you and I knew each other.

By the end of the shoot [of Wrestler], my trainer was pushing me up three flights of stairs to my house and holding my arm like I was an old cripple. I had three MRIs in the first two months of working on the film. I felt like it really was over by the time we started shooting the movie.

The two sports are as different as Ping-Pong and rugby. In boxing, you don't know what's going to happen. In wrestling, it's already prearranged. But the thing I didn't know about wrestling is that you really get hurt. Because, you know, you're wrestling in front of a live audience, and you end up doing things like jumps or slams, and 40 percent of the time you don't land right.

People need medicine and they need therapists.

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

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.

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

The acclaim I'm getting for 'The Wrestler' means everything in the world to me. But it also means I can't take my foot off the gas pedal.

I didn't have a childhood, really, because I worked my whole life and... other reasons. So when I had some success, I went ballistic. That was my childhood, and the party kept going on.

I have a really good relationship with a lot of designers. I like Gaultier, Billionaire and Cavalli.

Sometimes the independent movies can get a little too arty-farty. You watch the IFC Channel and you want to throw up. You don't always have to take things so serious, you know.

I grew up in a gym in Miami, the one where Muhammad Ali trained. I had 142 amateur fights and lost three.

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 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.

I try to find the right director who won't compromise his or anyone else's integrity, and yet be political enough to give the studio what they want, yet put up a fight to maintain that integrity.

I loved my mother, but I don't like her.

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.

[The tension] between the Christians and Muslims goes back to the Crusades, doesn't it? It's too easy to blame everything on one guy. These are unpredictable, dangerous times, and I don't think that anyone really knows quite what to do.

A lot of those who let you down are those who seemed the closest to you.

A reputation is really hard to live down.

Acting was never my first choice as a profession, but I came to terms with it when I decided I better buckle down and be the best I can be at it.

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.

Boxers are very isolated - or isolated within their own camps.

Change for me was really hard because I had built myself up to be a certain kind of man my whole life, as men are where I come from. I thought I got to handle things different that's gonna make me feel like a real pussy. For me it was hard to turn the other cheek. Even though it's a stronger choice. It was very hard to make the change, but I had to in order to survive. Otherwise they would have won.

Evan Rachel Wood is the best actress I've ever worked with, hands down.

Hey, baby, nobody suffers like the poor.

I couldn't direct traffic.It's hard enough just acting.

I did think for many, many years that because of my ability I could beat the system. And I was wrong.

I don't care what Tom Cruise says about therapy.

I had achieved so much success in my career and then had this spectacular fall from grace that left me unemployed and living in a town, Los Angeles, that is built on envy. Once you fall, people don't really root for you to come back again. I'd go to restaurants where I always had the best table and half the time they wouldn't even let me pay. And then when I stopped making movies, the same places wouldn't even give me a lousy table, never mind the best one!

I had gotten injured during the boxing, and I was supposed to take several months off because I'd had a couple of concussions, and so I sort of just left the boxing and got into the acting by accident.

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.

I never knew my father, and I'd hate to repeat that kind of cycle with my own children, because I'd also want to be there for them no matter what.

I probably did a dozen plays, like Off-Off-Broadway stuff.

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

I spent so long studying really hard to become a fine actor, but threw it all away because I got the adulation and the fame so easily

I started having some memory-loss issues. I took a neurological exam, and they said, "Well, you should stop fighting now." And I kept begging them for one more fight, one more fight, and the doctor said to me, "How much are they going to pay you?" I was supposed to fight three more times, and one would have been for a cruiser belt. So I said, "I just need to fight three more times." He said, "Listen, you can't even get hit in the head one more time, your neuro is so bad."

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

I think the first year and a half that I was in New York I was having trouble just living somewhere. Back in them days the city was a lot different than it is now.

I thought my talent would transcend my outspokenness. I was wrong.

I tried to change my name for the fights, but the only way they could pay me money was if I used my own name. I wanted to change my name to, like, Romeo something-or-other, and they said, "No, we can't do that. We've got to use Mickey Rourke." Because they paid me a lot of money to go over to Europe and Asia to fight.

I wanted to change my name to Romeo Florentino. Romeo Florentino - that's a good fighter's name.

If you look closely at some scenes in Diner, my eyes look like Dracula's.

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

I'm the worst surfer in California. My balance is off from boxing.

In boxing, you don't know what's going to happen. In wrestling, it's already prearranged.

In order to understand the stock market we have to realize that, like anything enormous and inert, it's fundamentally stable, and, like anything emotion-driven, it's volatile as hell. Got that? Me neither.

It was either therapy or die.

It's always been the case that you have the really rich, and the really poor. But hey, look, all the great empires have their periods where they rule the world, and then they crumble.

I've been with a lot of women, but who's counting? It's nothing I'm proud of. It's a physical need. Sometimes afterwards I just want to blow my brains out, it's so meaningless.

People are always afraid of the truth.

People ask me about that all the time. They say, "Did you ever think of directing?" And I say, "It's completely out of the question."

Since I knew wrestling was all choreographed, I thought, Oh, they don't get hurt at all. But I walked away with a renewed respect for the sport. Because I was very ignorant before - I knew nothing about it.

Sometimes, when a man is alone, that's all you got is your dog.

When I did Sean Penn's movie, I think I was living in, like, a $500-a-month room, and someone called me up or bumped into me and asked me if I'd come up to work for a day. That sort of got me going a little bit. But it wasn't until Sin City [2005] that I kind of got back into the game.

When I was like 12 or 13,Muhammad Ali gave me a pair of his trunks that were white satin with gold stripes. They were full of blood, and my mother threw them away. I think it's the first time I ever cursed at my mother.

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.

Wrestlers are all pretty busted-up by the ends of their careers.

Hollywood's famous for putting you in a box.