Sean Penn quotes:

There's a lot of mediocrity being celebrated, and a lot of wonderful stuff being ignored or discouraged.

When you act in a film, you're inevitably surrounded by people you didn't choose, right down to the set painter. I like being able to pick the family I'm waking up to in the morning that's going to make this group effort to tell a story that applies to what's interesting to me at that stage in my life.

Sacrificing American soldiers or innocent civilians in an unprecedented preemptive attack on a separate sovereign nation may well prove itself a most temporary medicine.

Hal Holbrook was in one of my first television movies when I was about 18 or 19. He'd made such a strong impression on me and a lasting one in terms of what being an actor was.

I had a house burn down once, and everything in life burned, except my family, and it was so liberating. I didn't have a bad moment about it. It sort of reinvigorated my interest in a lot of things.

The bottom line is, you love your wife, you do your best with that.

Child-rearing is my main interest now. I'm a hands-on father.

I just want real creative freedom without worrying about, you know, car payments.

When I buy a Nikon camera, I have no tolerance for the instructions. I'm ready to make some mistakes using it and get some bad pictures back until I've figured it out for myself.

There's not a lot of good movies being made.

There is a strength of character in the people who have, by and large, never experienced comfort.

I think we all have light and dark inside us.

Well, look at all of these summer blockbusters. You can't help but laugh a little, because you've already seen a lot of these movies 482 times.

Turning one's back on stardom might be the highest form of common sense. One that I would aspire to be more complete with.

Anger can be a problem, but it has tremendous potential, too. It's just figuring out what to do with it.

It has nothing to do with the emotional demands of a role; I've done comedies that are as draining to me as any drama.

So if we have anything original to offer, it's to speak from our own life about the society we're in.

I love stories about people who are smart enough to know that what they're doing is destroying them, but that knowing that doesn't help them.

Marriage ain't easy, but it's great most of the time.

I cannot tell you that I ever fell in love with the theater as an audience. I fell in love with the theater as an actor for a period of time, but I have struggled as an audience, and I struggle more now than then. I was always a movie guy.

Putting something in a movie because it's in the news doesn't make it political to me. If you're not going outside the same old, same old, if you're not pushing the envelope, then you're not doing anything. A good movie is a political thing.

Craft comes into acting later rather than sooner. I was somebody who had to learn through a process - a natural actor doesn't need to.

I love acting, truly my favorite people are actors.

In school, I was a genius of the year preceding the year I was in, every year.

You try to do your best at what you're getting paid for.

I think that it is a good time for those who voted for the ban against gay marriage to sit and reflect and anticipate their great shame and the shame in their grandchildren's eyes if they continue that way of support. We've got to have equal rights for everyone

Well, I think that when you direct a movie or write it. And in the case of the two movies I did, I wrote and directed, they occupy a special place for you.

The major studios are by and large banks, and they give you what is by and large a loan to make a movie. Like banks, they want their money back plus.

Whatever one considers art to be, there is in many people a hunger to express themselves creatively and to feel authentic in doing that.

You're always having to live more to fuel something new. It's an obligation to yourself and to the audience. The personal baggage that comes with being a known actor just adds to that struggle.

I'm not going to have a better day, a more magical moment than the first time I heard my daughter giggle.

I lost a friend I was blessed to have. My thoughts are with the family of President Chavez and the people of Venezuela.

When I was growing up and somebody like Robert De Niro had a movie come out, it was a cultural event. Because he had such a confidence and a single mission that was so intimate.

I can make a better living as an actor than I can as a director. Though I certainly would prefer to be directing movies.

A child gets a fever in the United States and it's high enough and sustainable enough, all of us can bring a child to an emergency room. Most Haitians never had that opportunity. They didn't have the emergency room to bring them to. Virtually every time your child has 102 fever, you wait for it to die and you have no clean water to give it.

I don't have any particular excitement about working with any specific director or actor at this point.

I've never really been one to get what they call stage fright so much.

As a foreign worker in Haiti, speaking for myself, speaking for the workers, our organization is about 95 percent Haitian, but even foreign workers driving through, we have had very minimal security issues.

Yeah, I had a tremendous time shooting in Nebraska. I like that state a lot, all over it.

I think life's an irrational obsession.

I'm not going to recommend recklessness but somewhere just short of it - testing yourself and proactively pursuing a rite of passage has become necessary because in western developed countries we've become very comfort-addicted.

When everything gets answered, it's fake.

I'll tell you what I probably would prefer to happen less and less: actors that I know and respect in shampoo ads. Or modeling.

I'm not good at talking to strangers, whether they're sick children or they're - I'm just not good. I'm shy with it.

I like to believe that love is a reciprocal thing, that it can't really be felt, truly, by one.

There is no re-inventing the wheel.

Jon Krakauer had documented it very accurately and very well but this kid made a real impression on people, and likewise they on him. To talk to them was very moving in many cases because they talk about him like they saw him yesterday. In most cases they knew this kid for a couple of weeks in their whole life and he just lasted with them.

Love is a mess, at best, and I figure it can be very real in spite of all the things people try to attach to it.

I've always operated under the notion that audiences don't always know when they're being lied to, but that they always know when they're being told the truth.

We've let the blade of our innocence dull over time, and it's only in innocence that you find any kind of magic, any kind of courage.

I've been a road-rat since I got my driver's licence at 16, so I've probably gone across America 20 times.

What happens is things come to you - director, script - and if you respond to it, it's because it's tapping into some part of what's inside you, and different roles tap into different parts.

I'm not a breakfast eater.

I choose movies that I think will speak to what's important.

A lot of critics sometimes get into analyzing the way actors direct versus non-actors directing. And they really always miss it. It's one of those things where, by not being practitioners, they just came up with something that made sense to them.

Oh, I'm a big-mouth. I said a lot of things.

I can always see light in any situation. It's just the way I'm made.

A clearer and more conventional narrative would have helped the film without, in my opinion, lessening its beauty and its impact. Frankly, I'm still trying to figure out what I'm doing there and what I was supposed to add in that context! What's more, Terry himself never managed to explain it to me clearly.

A SWAT team surrounded my house and came in every door. But it happened because on the day that we split up, Madonna developed a concern that if she were to return to the house, she would get a very severe haircut.

All I need are some tasty waves, a cool buzz, and I'm fine

And dressed her [Madonna] up like a turkey. After I read that stuff, I thought long and hard about what one would do to dress someone up like a turkey. And I nailed it. I figured you've got to get out the Playtex glove, blow it up and put the glove over the head.

At this stage, what would be rewarding would be for audiences to want to watch.

Fulfilling what you start is why you start something.

Haiti kind of gets a hold of you.

Haiti, like any place, has its security problems; it has a great challenge in terms of establishing a kind of globally acceptable rule of law.

I am a Justin Timberlake fan.

I can tell you that my contribution based on my interpretation of the book is unchanged. The other things, in terms of doing the research and following the trail of it, were probably pretty similar to what I would have done then. I think that what makes me celebrate that it took the 10 years is the various other people and contributors that I ended up having on board.

I can't imagine being quite as lucky at any other time - I certainly never have been before. That goes right down from my producing partners to people like Eddie Vedder. But the two things that make me feel that this was meant to be now and not before was that the story itself has more resonance today - I find it a more important story today than it was then - and Emile.

I do not believe in a simplistic and inflammatory view of good and evil. I believe this is a big world full of men, women, and children who struggle to eat, to love, to work, to protect their families, their beliefs, and their dreams.

I don't believe there are climate skeptics. I think there are people who indulge in a culture of what can be reduced to Fox network thinking. That has nothing to do with the politics that apply to the protection of quality of life in any sense. It's like talking to a member of a cult.

I don't think you can get away with putting your talents in a toilet bowl and not having them flushed away. Forever. There is a level of murder of one's soul and of the culture that they're supposed to be feeding vitamins to...

I had a house burn down once, and everything in life burned except my family, and it was so liberating. I didn't have a bad moment about it. It sort of reinvigorated my interest in a lot of things. I wonder if there should be some kind of anarchy.

I really love to make movies.

I regret my El Chapo interview didn't spark debate about the war on drugs.

I still think photographers should be lashed out at. They should be put in a cage where you can poke them with a stick for a quarter. But not in a hostile way, just for giggles. They really are on the attack against mankind; it's a disease. They should be helped somewhere. But I'd still like to poke them with a stick.

I think if you want good things to happen for a country like Haiti, then you need to provide the circumstances where the Haitians can do that.

I think that I've still not been successful at playing the role of the retired actor, and I'd like to work on that.

I think that people like the Howard Sterns, the Bill O'Reillys and to a lesser degree the bin Ladens of the world are making a horrible contribution.

I think you start to prepare the minute you read something.

If there's anything disgusting about the movie business, it's the whoredom of my peers.

If you don't vote, you don't matter.

If you're willing to put two thoughts into a picture then you're already ahead of the game.

I'm a huge Woody Allen fan. Good movie, bad movie, it doesn't matter - I just like his movies.

In between, I go broke because I seem to do movies where you're not paid a lot as an actor.

In short form I'll say it was an approach to the family and to [author] Jon Krakauer that then led to me seeming to rise to the top of the heap of several filmmakers that were trying to get the rights. And by top of the heap I mean in terms of being somebody that was trusted to do it as they said they were going to attempt to do it and that this way of doing it would be something they would be willing to allow.

It's a foreground of my feeling. That place moves me. And I don't mean my country; it's part of our shared natural world that happens to be particular to a sense of wherever my storytelling inclinations come from and my own history of kind of being a road rat and travelling.

It's only in innocence you find any kind of magic, any kind of courage.

My favorite thing to do is not act - it's that simple.

My greatest interest in it was certainly not to avoid those things that were going to be controversial about the family but the interest I had in the story was predominantly what he was pursuing and not as much what he was fleeing.

On any movie I'm involved with, I say what I think.

One of the reasons people sell out so quickly is because even the talented think they're frauds. It's a culture that doesn't encourage people to believe in the work they do. You're told to second-guess yourself all the time. That's where I think a little hostility and arrogance can save you. And I've never been lacking for either.

One of the things you don't have in Haiti is you don't have anybody on crack doing something completely out of - that's unpredictable. Even at the worst times in Haiti, the violence that had happened, the lack of security that happened, was largely predictable because it was politically tied.

Sense of self, and the way one shares it, is perhaps the most valuable and poetic gift in the arsenal of one's life and craft.

That difference do you think you can make, one man in all this madness?

That on a romantic level, if you feel it about somebody and it's pure, it means that they do too.

That was madness. You're never going to bring one of those down with a handgun.

The advice you give to young directors for sure is to go out and become some version of a successful movie actor. Do that first and say yes to people like Terrence Malick and Clint Eastwood and Woody Allen when they come and offer you movies. It's a great front row seat to filmmaking.

The heartbreak that it might not happen wasn't something that I wanted to face with any more weight. Then, when I got the call to go ahead I never thought for a second as I was approaching it who I would get - that would come later. Again, I think the idea was that I now had the rights to make the movie and I can start writing it but if I have to wait another 10 years before I find an actor that's right for it, I'd be very happy to do that.

The one thing you can count on in Hollywood - across the board - is cowardice.

The thing that's very close in the process is writing and acting, not directing. Directing's very different.

There are a few directors around who I have some excitement about spending my $7 at the theatre watching their movies.

There is a kind of sense of truth and reconciliation that is non-formalized, but it's understood and accepted. Haitians are Haitians and there is an inherent loyalty that forgives an awful lot.

There is no shame in my saying that we all want to be loved.

Venezuela and its revolution will endure under the proven leadership of Vice President Maduro,

Well, I'm pretty anti legends - I just don't think they're useful. So that certainly wouldn't be my intention. But will it contribute to that? Sure. Any medicine can be mis-used. But I think that there is a great courage, innocence and magic to him that more than a legend is about connection.

Well, it was interesting because when I was going to do it the first time in my head was Leonardo DiCaprio [for Chris] and Marlon Brando was going to play the character that Hal Holbrook eventually played. But then when it wasn't to be and there was no promise that it ever would be I think some part of me didn't want to attach specifics to it anymore - actors or anything else - because I wanted to see it made that much more badly.

Well, the kind of central question: "Do you want to live - and I don't mean stay alive - do you want to feel your life while you're living it?" You know, there's somewhere to go that was here before we were and is going to be here after us, so get out there in it. It doesn't take somebody who's got some self-important sense of their own attachment to nature to recognise that you're just stupid if you don't go out there.

Whatever I was able to do with those experiences certainly contribute to whatever I'm able to do as a director. The corruption in that is that most of what I acted in the last 10 years was to steal film school time from these guys. Those were the people I thought I could learn from as a director.

When I go to bed at night and I think of humanity at large, I think of all those things.

When you get divorced, all the truths that come out, you sit there and go, 'What the f**k was I doing? What was I doing believing that this person was invested in this way?' Which is a fantastically strong humiliation in the best sense. It can make somebody very bitter and very hard and closed off, but I find it does the opposite to me.

Yeah, I had actually tried to stop acting before I made Dead Man Walking.

You need governance, but you also need a middle class, you need agriculture, they need to be able to export. I think that's probably the biggest issue, the job creation that could come with the kinds of things that Haiti has all the potential in the world to export.

You tolerate me. You really tolerate me.