John Malkovich Quotes

I don't need to be liked.

In New York in the Forties or Fifties, everybody's in a suit, an overcoat and a hat.

Most films, it doesn't matter if you see them or not.

My father was an exceptionally strong influence on me.

Most of the women that I like have a haunted quality - they're sort of like women who live in a haunted house by themselves.

I wouldn't say anything I ever did in film would be something I'd use the word proud about. I've done better work in the theater.

I don't care what other people think. I don't think it matters.

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 go around the world, working with all kinds of people who I love.

I'm not a psychiatrist. I'm not treating patients.

Chicago my favourite American city. I'm very much a typical midwesterner, and I don't think the condition is curable.

I find it hard to pre-plan every element of everything I do. It's not my thing.

I'm more likely to lose my temper on a film set than almost anywhere. Often the level of idiocy is so exalted that it's impossible to comprehend.

As an actor there are no drawbacks.

When you think of how history is revealed, we know certain things to be facts at certain periods of time, which turn out not to be so factual as time marches on.

Anybody doing something brings something to it.

I never wanted to be with someone who just hung around the house.

I've always been an avid reader. Everyone in my family read a lot. Considering we were from a little town, we were pretty literate.

It seems whenever I've had a method or what I perceived to be an intellectual groundwork of some sort - a kind of game plan - it's always been the most morbid failure.

I don't really go through a process, it goes through me.

I always wanted to be fashionable.

You know, I'm really not interested in someone telling me that something's good or bad.

I love to watch good actors who surprise and amuse me.

The most evocative thing to me is probably when a writer and a group of performers can collectively put together something compelling that asks the really simple question: 'How do we live?'

One doesn't know if one had a happy childhood or not. I don't really know what it means.

I don't throw things or yell.

Sigmund Freud said we act out our own dreams, but if you are only an actor you are not acting out your own dream. You are simply participating in someone else's dream.

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 can be a mason and build 50 buildings, but it doesn't mean you can design one.

And if you say a word about this over the radio, the next wings you see will belong to the flies buzzing over your rotting corpse.

I don't have a great intellect, and I can't compete with people who do. I feel certain things. And all I know, and all I can do, is what I feel.

I wasn't really raised to be the type of person to have doubts.

There are many, many benefits to being known for whatever it is you do. To deny that would be sort of asinine and vulgar.

The projects I look for to produce or direct would not be ones in which I would want to act.

I still have a temper, I suppose.

I'm supposed to be a pretty good theater actor.

I think with actors, if you just don't set about trying to crush their confidence immediately, you're usually OK.

I don't think my parents know what I do.

I'm not a very skeptical person.

I think people seem to sort of associate me with danger. And I don't see that at all.

I don't want a trillion-dollar empire to run.

I don't like things too overstated in the cut or too perfect.

I never really did a western western.

I like very much to do movies.

I like to direct movies, but I don't like to goof around for eight years talking about it.

It never occurred to me to be an actor.

You have to do things people see or you don't get to do anything.

I don't remember my life before I had children.

I don't mind what I play, really.

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.