Mickey Rourke Quotes

I grew up in a gym in Miami, the one where Muhammad Ali trained. I had 142 amateur fights and lost three.

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.

Comeback is a good word, man.

I had a lot of anger inside me and that came out at times that were not particularly advantageous to me career-wise.

I'm an old broken down piece of meat and I deserve to be all alone . . .

Hey, baby, nobody suffers like the poor.

A couple of guys won Academy Awards for the things that I turned down. Today, after coming to terms with everything, after being in therapy for a long time-there are areas where I will compromise.

People are always afraid of the truth.

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.

All that prosthetic makeup drains you. By the time it's lunch, you're done.

I spent a lot of years trying to beat the system and, in the end, the system kicked my behind good.

Some of your worst gangsters are guys who were very low-key.

It's the formulaic studio movies the make money, and when they do, the actors in them are automatically movie stars.

All I am hoping for is to be able to work-I think my best work is still ahead of me-I think all that I have been through in the last several years have only made me a better, more interesting actor.

I never look backwards. I have always been an athlete. I boxed before I acted.

I thought my talent would transcend my outspokenness. I was wrong.

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.

People ask me about that all the time. They say, "Did you ever think of directing?" And I say, "It's completely out of the question."

Hollywood's famous for putting you in a box.

I always knew I'd accomplish something very special - like robbing a bank perhaps.

I was very immature when I was young, and for me there was no balance. Everything was just all or nothing.

Usually if you read a screenplay, no matter who's writing it, the bad guy is always written as a one-dimensional bad guy.

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.

Evan Rachel Wood is the best actress I've ever worked with, hands down.

A lot of the stuff I am now seeing is edgy, raw kinda material.

Wrestlers are all pretty busted-up by the ends of their careers.

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.

Wrestling and boxing is like Ping-Pong and rugby. There's no connection.

Actors should shut up about politics. They tend to be ill-informed finger-pointers who just cosy up to some flavour of-the-month liberal.

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.

I have a really good relationship with a lot of designers. I like Gaultier, Billionaire and Cavalli.

Women are much stronger than men. When a woman says enough is enough, which means enough is enough. Man will always lie at her feet in the hope of return. I was lying. And somehow happy.

If you look closely at some scenes in Diner, my eyes look like Dracula's.

Years ago I realized that maybe I made mistake, politically, when I turned a lot of that stuff down. I would go off to obscure places and make movies that six people went to see.

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

Sometimes, when a man is alone, that's all you got is your dog.

I think the first year and a half that I was in New York I was having trouble just living somewhere. Back in them days the city was a lot different than it is now.

I started to shortcircuit because I had high aspirations for the film. I never told anybody that.

It's always been the case that you have the really rich, and the really poor. But hey, look, all the great empires have their periods where they rule the world, and then they crumble.

It was either therapy or die.

My dogs are more important than my family.

I have so many boxing gloves around my house that I would get them confused with other gloves.

I probably did a dozen plays, like Off-Off-Broadway stuff.

In boxing, you don't know what's going to happen. In wrestling, it's already prearranged.

I don't care what Tom Cruise says about therapy.

A reputation is really hard to live down.

I did think for many, many years that because of my ability I could beat the system. And I was wrong.

Boxers are very isolated - or isolated within their own camps.

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.

I wanted to change my name to Romeo Florentino. Romeo Florentino - that's a good fighter's name.