Sean Penn

Sean: 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.

Sean: You build a cage based on your sense of the truth and your sense of the aspects of the character that need to tell the story. If you've done your job right, which I've had varying degrees of success doing at different times in my life, then you're able to function very freely within that cage.

Sean: I was brought up in a country that relished fear-based religion, corrupt government, and an entire white population living on stolen property that they murdered for and that is passed on from generation to generation.

Sean: I think it's really important to be able to feel your own life, and I had felt so numbed by what had been a kind of surreal saturation of what was going on in the Middle East, and what it was going to mean, particularly relative to my kids' future and things like that.

Sean: I can never get ahead of the game because of the movies I do.

Sean: 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.

Sean: If the primary statement of the film is that if you have good abs it's OK to kill people, I pass.

Sean: Nic Cage is no longer an actor. He's more like a performer.

Sean: E.L. Doctorow had a quote I've used a lot of times, that the responsibility of the artist is to know the time in which he lives.

Sean: 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. And if there are what I think are unsung truths to be talked about in a film -- through a character, through a story -- and that dominates the piece, that's the key for me. I think the biggest thing is to not participate in the damaging, lying cinema.

Sean: The horror of the Academy Awards is what the press does leading up to it to make it a popular TV show. Where they'll actually make it like it's an arm- wrestling event between two actors. That becomes very petty, and that's something that's embarrassing to follow up with accepting the invitation to the party.

Sean: Your life is what you bring to any story. This is a life craft. It's 'How do you feel? Who are you? What do you have to say?'

Sean: There's an interesting parallel between Bush and Richard Nixon. While Nixon was clearly a superior statesman and in many ways a more intelligent politician, what they share is a kind of boldness in how they emote their insecurities. What we're finding with George Bush - part of what's familiar to people and that adds to his likability for many - is that there's a commonality of deep insecurity and his handling it with a kind of bravado. What they both did is handle things with a similar certainty - certainty being the "disease of kings.

Sean: ...I don't consider myself specifically political, you know? I think of working as an actor as being a human thing. The concerns I have that fall into politics are human concerns.

Sean: But the bigger issue is that it's an absolutely stupid notion that you should take the title of someone's profession and attach it to what they should not do. It has nothing to do with citizenry.

Sean: Hollywood is much more creatively corrupt than it is economically [corrupt]. It takes $1 for them to kill their dreams. Their dreams are worth more than $1.