Sean Penn Quotations | Page 2

There is no re-inventing the wheel.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'm not a breakfast eater.

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.

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.

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

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

I really love to make movies.

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 life's an irrational obsession.

When everything gets answered, it's fake.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

If you don’t vote, you don’t matter.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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