People are always afraid of the truth.
— Mickey Rourke
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.
Winning an Oscar ain't about performance. There's a lot of politics involved.
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.
People need medicine and they need therapists.
I'm the worst surfer in California. My balance is off from boxing.
Being out of work for 13 to 15 years is no walk in the park.
My dogs are more important than my family.
Sometimes, when a man is alone, that's all you got is your dog.
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 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 don't have many Hollywood friends anyway; I thought with my ability I didn't need to make those kind of relationships, but maybe I should have done. Might have made my life easier!
You can be mediocre, the way most actors are, and you can still be a top movie star, even if your movies are boring and predictable. All you have to do is know how to sell yourself, let yourself be manufactured.
It's no fun being a loser. Trust me.
Hollywood's famous for putting you in a box.
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 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.
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.
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.
There's always going to be a war going on inside of me. That's just, I think, my make-up.
The hardest thing in life to do is to change.
I don't care what Tom Cruise says about therapy.
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.
Some of your worst gangsters are guys who were very low-key.
Wrestling and boxing is like Ping-Pong and rugby. There's no connection.
I spent a lot of years trying to beat the system and, in the end, the system kicked my behind good.
I grew up in a gym in Miami, the one where Muhammad Ali trained. I had 142 amateur fights and lost three.
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.
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.
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.'
You know, back in acting school they always teach you, 'Make bold choices and look for activities that are interesting.'
Usually if you read a screenplay, no matter who's writing it, the bad guy is always written as a one-dimensional bad guy.
To me, everything's competition.
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.
The ladies love me and I love the ladies!
I'd just as soon do a big-budget movie as an independent one.
I used to love playing football in high school. I played with the same guys for 10 years.
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 love the first Godfather movie, part one. And two.
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.
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.
Once you've been somebody, really, you have a career and you're a nobody anymore, and you're getting older, you're living what's called a state of shame.
A reputation is really hard to live down.
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 loved my mother, but I don't like her.
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.
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.
In boxing, you don't know what's going to happen. In wrestling, it's already prearranged.
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.
Evan Rachel Wood is the best actress I've ever worked with, hands down.
