I prefer to conduct my life based on how I treat people.
— John Malkovich
Most films, it doesn't matter if you see them or not.
Imagine how asleep or utterly unperceptive and clueless you would have to be not to see yourself as absurd for the most part.
It never occurred to me to be an actor.
Unlike my grandfather or my brother, I've actually been able to make some money at a racetrack.
Utopia means elsewhere.
Politics is not really my thing.
I think with actors, if you just don't set about trying to crush their confidence immediately, you're usually OK.
I don't throw things or yell.
I always wanted to be fashionable.
I think 1973 was the nadir of fashion. When you watch the coverage from that era, you're struck by the astonishing ugliness of the clothes.
I'm not a psychiatrist. I'm not treating patients.
Well, I like to have fun at work.
I find it hard to pre-plan every element of everything I do. It's not my thing.
People get up, they go to work, they have their lives, but you'll never see the headlines say, 'Six billion people got along rather well today.' You'll have the headline about the 30 people who shot each other.
People always say life is short. I've never been convinced of that - mine seems to have a tendency to go on and on.
My father was a very contradictory man.
I go around the world, working with all kinds of people who I love.
I don't wake up drenched in sweat because I haven't been on stage in years.
I don't understand how somebody wouldn't have a sense of humor about themselves.
Well, I design costumes because I started with the theater in Chicago, but somehow a few lines just sort of fell to me to do it. And I studied it in school and I always liked it.
You have to play your characters, not like them.
Every country has their problems.
If you're too smart it can limit you because you spend so much time thinking that you don't do anything.
I think I was born at a time when an American male had so many advantages and opportunities that weren't available to men before or after, just a very brief period.
I'm not a control maniac.
I've done quite a few big American films.
'Secretariat' was such a magnificent animal, unbelievably beautiful and powerful. It's always nice to see something that close to perfection, a reason to celebrate.
The world is ruled by violence, or at least the imminent threat of violence. It always has been.
Quite often - a lot of the work I had done had been extensively with women. Most especially in the theater, but also quite often in the movies. That has its own delights, and maybe pitfalls too.
I don't mind what I play, really.
We have a tendency to think everyone's idiotic and everyone's only doing something idiotic, and the world is controlled by a not-so-secret group of morons. There's great truth in that, I suppose, but then it's also not true.
Failure's a natural part of life.
I think people seem to sort of associate me with danger. And I don't see that at all.
I don't need to be liked.
You can be a mason and build 50 buildings, but it doesn't mean you can design one.
I was never a fanatical movie person.
Anybody doing something brings something to it.
You can't take a play someone has directed and do whatever you want with it.
Actors generally get to do things you probably shouldn't do in real life - well, at least as much as one might like to or be tempted to. Though I suppose a lot of actors just go ahead and do it, don't they?
Scary monsters are like Hula Hoops. They come in and out of fashion.
I'm very much a typical midwesterner, and I don't think the condition is curable.
It's tough to figure out how do we compete in Europe and North America, when obviously a living wage for us is very different than a living wage in Indonesia.
I like very much to do movies.
You know, I'm really not interested in someone telling me that something's good or bad.
I mean, anything that money can be made off will never be a problem to make, no matter what it is.
I like to direct movies, but I don't like to goof around for eight years talking about it.
I'm an atheist.
I don't care what other people think. I don't think it matters.
I don't want a trillion-dollar empire to run.
