George Clooney Quotes
Actor
There's a funny thing about fame. The truth is you run as fast as you can towards it because it's everything you want. Not just the fame but what it represents, meaning work, meaning opportunity. And then you get there, and it's shocking how immediately you become enveloped in this world that is incredibly restricting.
I don't like to share my personal life... it wouldn't be personal if I shared it.
The only failure is not to try.
Run for office? No. I've slept with too many women, I've done too many drugs, and I've been to too many parties.
Growing old on screen is not for the faint of heart.
I don't believe in happy endings, but I do believe in happy travels, because ultimately, you die at a very young age, or you live long enough to watch your friends die. It's a mean thing, life.
You never really learn much from hearing yourself talk.
My grandparents back in Kentucky owned a tobacco farm. So, to make money in the summer, we could cut and chop and top and house and strip the tobacco.
I enjoy going on motorcycle trips and stopping in small towns and enjoying drinks with the locals.
If people see me having dinner with a beautiful woman, they immediately believe that I'm having a love affair with her. Of course that's rubbish. I'm not a playboy!
I'm only two years older than Brad Pitt, but I look a lot older, which used to greatly frustrate me. It doesn't anymore. I don't have to fit into that category and get trounced by Tom Cruise and Brad.
Failures are infinitely more instructive than successes.
I don't tweet, I don't go on Facebook. I think there's too much information about all of us out there. I'm liking the idea of privacy more and more.
I don't care. Charlton Heston is the head of the National Rifle Association. He deserves whatever anyone says about him.
You have only a short period of time in your life to make your mark, and I'm there now.
The people I've respected most in the industry over the years - Paul Newman, for instance. I just loved the way he handled growing old on-screen. It's understanding that you're now basically a character actor. Which is fine, but you have to pay attention to it.
I had to stop going to auditions thinking, 'Oh, I hope they like me.' I had to go in thinking I was the answer to their problem.
I think people in Italy live their lives better than we do. It's an older country, and they've learned to celebrate dinner and lunch, whereas we sort of eat as quickly as we can to get through it.
I'm not smart enough and I don't know enough about what's going on.
You can't legislate good taste.
I certainly direct with confidence even if I'm not confident. I learned early on as an actor that confidence can be faked, and it's not always a terrible thing to do. A lot of times if people feel you're confident, then they're confident.
In the '60s, when I was growing up, one of the great elements of American culture was the protest song. There were songs about the civil rights movement, the women's rights movement, the antiwar movement. It wasn't just Bob Dylan, it was everybody at the time.
I'm the flavor of the month.
I've been my most happy and my most unhappy in relationships. I have family and friends and people I care very much about. I've got a really, really, really good life.
I watch 'Batman & Robin' from time to time. It's the worst movie I ever made, so it's a good lesson in humility.
It's possible for me to make a bad movie out of a good script, but I can't make a good movie from a bad script.
I find that as you get older, you start to simplify things in general.
I'm so lucky to have been raised the way I have, because my parents believed that everyone had the right to their own feelings, opinions, and existence; as long as they weren't harming others, you had to defend those rights.
They say I was a bad Batman, that it was my fault, that I buried the franchise. But the truth is, it was a big project. I was pretty intimidated in that world. I did the best I could in the situation I was given.
I believe in all the qualities of being a liberal. I keep going back to all the great social events in our country's history, starting with the Salem witch trials, where the conservative view was that they're witches and should be burned at the stake, and the liberal view was there's no such thing as witches.
It's incredibly unfair. You don't see a lot of 60-year-old women with 20-year-old men onscreen.
I've certainly done some turkeys along the way and made some dumb choices in my career, mostly early on. I'm one of the lucky ones who got to make a lot of mistakes very early when no one was paying attention.
On Christmas morning, before we could open our Christmas presents, we would go to this stranger's home and bring them presents. I remember helping clean the house up and putting up a tree. My father believed that you have a responsibility to look after everyone else.
Who would name their kid Jack with the last words 'off' at the end of the last name? No wonder that guy is screwed up.
I go on YouTube when somebody says to look something up.
In doing the screenplay for 'Good Night, and Good Luck,' the most important thing for me was to constantly go back to wherever the opposition would argue. So I had to keep reading all the books and articles about why McCarthy is such a good guy.
I love my grey hair and wrinkles. I love the fact that my face has more of an edge and more character than it did when I was in my twenties and thirties. No Botox for me.
I love children and I get along with them great. It's just that I believe if you're going to be a parent, there has to be something inside you that says, 'I want a family.' I don't feel that sense of urgency.
After doing One Fine Day and playing a pediatrician on ER, I'll never have kids. I'm going to have a vasectomy.
I grew up in the world of bad television, on my dad's sets and then as a young schmuck on dating shows and so on.
I was watching 'Up In The Air' and I thought, 'Jesus, who's the old gray-haired guy?' And it was me. I never wear makeup for movies and now it's starting to show.
Fame can be very dangerous, because you can start to enjoy that part of it. And that's not the good part of what I do for a living. The good part is the making of films. The unpleasant part is the fame part, if you're not careful.
On an awards-show day, I can play basketball, go in, take a shower and put on a tux - it takes me three minutes to put on a tux - and be out the door in 15 minutes.
The idea that every time you do a film you're supposed to be tortured confuses me. I mean, guys who say, 'Oh, it's really tough, my character is really suffering' -come on. For us, even in the rotten ones we've had a good time. I don't think you have to suffer.
You make a lot of films, do you? You make a lot of films yourself? Yeah, I'd like to see you make a film first before you get to talk about it. What a jerk.
One of my favorite films is 'Big Fish,' which I think is a masterpiece.
I bought a piano once because I had the dream of playing As Time Goes By as some girl's leaning on it drinking a martini. Great image. But none of it worked out. I can't even play Chopsticks. But I've got a nice piano at my house!
The simple truth is that everyone has an opinion, everyone has the right to voice it, and they should if they want to.
But I'm kind of comfortable with getting older because it's better than the other option, which is being dead. So I'll take getting older.
The government itself is running exactly like the Sopranos and they sit back and they make deals. And they say okay, 'I'm going do this: France, you're getting the pipelines.'
I'm kind of comfortable with getting older because it's better than the other option, which is being dead. So I'll take getting older.
People know everything about everybody now.
I think the reason why a lot of young people are such screw ups... is oftentimes they didn't have the luxury I had of forming important relationships and opinions and life experiences before having success.
I think one of the major misconceptions about me is that I live my life the way people think I lead my life, with hot and cold drinks running everywhere and a party all the time. They think of my life in terms of certain excesses that don't really exist. Things are actually fairly simple.
Hosting is work. It means you don't get to go up to your room and disappear and take a nap. Like everybody else does after lunch. I'm talking about hosting, not hosting a dinner party, but hosting people staying in your home.
I don't know if winning at any cost is wrong or not. There are times I've thought that the end justified the means.
I probably wouldn't be a good spokesman for an electric car, because I'll still get on a private jet, and one flight on a private jet undoes all my electric-car good deeds.
There is something very unsettling about being with someone when they die. People say it's peaceful. It's not peaceful. It's the most personal thing you can do, is die, and you feel almost like you're invading someone's most personal moment by being there.
I'd think, 'In a relationship, we should never have his kind of fight.' Then, instead of figuring out how to make it work, I looked for a way to get out of it. The truth is, you shouldn't be married if your that kind of person.
I've had some success at writing and directing, and I like it. It's infinitely more creative than just acting, and I have things I want to say and do.
I grew up in a family of storytellers, but Google has destroyed us because you can fact-check everything. We'd always like the stories to be a little better than they were.
There is a strange pecking order among actors. Theatre actors look down on film actors, who look down on TV actors. Thank God for reality shows, or we wouldn't have anybody to look down on.
Directors are the captains of the ship, and it's your job as the lead actor to make sure that the rest of the cast understand that by doing whatever he says.
You have to remember that in the microcosm of Cincinnati, Ohio, through northern Kentucky, my father was a big star, still is. So that made my sister and me really visible. Everybody knew us, talked about us.
Having 'Oscar winner' on your tombstone is a great thing.
I had my Aunt Rosie, who was famous and then not, so I got a lesson in fame early on. And I understood how little it has to do with you. And also how you could use it.
Directing is really exciting. In the end, it's more fun to be the painter than the paint.
When you're young you believe it when people tell you how good you are. And that's the danger, you inhale. Everyone will tell you you're a genius, which you are not, and if you understand that, you win.
My parents were disappointed I didn't finish college, and they were really upset when I went to Hollywood to become an actor. I was a big disappointment to them.
Hollywood still makes things. We still export a couple billion dollars' worth of product overseas. Original, new product. Some people might not agree that it's original or new, but basically it is.
I'm the old-fashioned type who prefers to meet a woman in a more normal setting. I don't like to feel that I'm being hunted down. I've always liked to do my own hunting when it comes to meeting women.
I use my film-making to work through my deep questions and my deep problems. I think I could watch each film and tell you exactly which part of my psyche I'm trying to work out.
There's a certain cruelty to being on a big screen as your eyelids start to sag and your hair falls out and turns gray that you either have to be able to handle or not. What you can't do is try to force yourself into roles that you could have played or would have played ten years earlier.
I had a Tesla. I was one of the first cats with a Tesla. But I'm telling you, I've been on the side of the road a while in that thing.
You don't want to try to look younger, because you'll look wrong. You dye your hair, you look wrong. You wear a bad toupee, you look wrong. You wear makeup to hide things, you get your eyes done, you look wrong.
The first thing that I learned - and I understood it at a really young age - was that I could get a laugh. Really early. Because my mother and father are funny.
I do happen to have a good life... But I also like to work. I feel like I got the brass ring and I got very lucky in this.
We're picking on people we can beat.
It's very easy for people to be critical of President Obama's first term, but let's face it, he didn't exactly inherit the country in the best shape.
When you first start out as an actor, you're just looking for a good part. As time goes on, if you're being held responsible for the movies themselves, you're looking for a good script all around.
I enjoy living in a nice house and having a nice life. So I do two or three commercials overseas a year to sort of fill in, because they pay pretty well.
'Ides of March' I did for scale - scale as a director, scale as an actor, scale as a writer.
I have a real interest in pushing some of the limits of things that studios don't want to make.
I've been working with Pat Robertson on Africa debt-relief, and we disagree on virtually everything except certain very specific, inalienable rights, and the truth is that morality and patriotism come in all shapes and sizes.
I do know something about the news world. I was sitting on the floors of newsrooms since I was seven years old, and I've been around them my whole life. I understand that someone looks at a story with famous people in it, and you want to put it out.
Shutting down the government is not how you make government work.
Over the years, over the history of our country, liberals have stood on many of the right sides of the issues.
The last real movie stars were probably Redford and Newman. And things were different then. There wasn't this amazing amount of magazines and information about them.
I like owning dirt. You know, I spent a lot of time broke when I moved to California. So deep in my soul is still this idea of being unemployed. To me, owning land means you could sell it at some point and have money.
America can't beat anyone anymore.
The problem is, we elected a manager and we need a leader. Let's face it: Bush is just dim.
I'm really white trash.
I'm certainly the last person to give advice on, well, anything.
The hardest thing is trying not to correct everything on the Internet. It'd be night and day - wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. So you just have to say, 'All right, I'll take it, bring it on.'
As you get older and ease your way into being a character actor you have to be comfortable with where you are in life and career, and I'm very comfortable with what I'm doing - working on projects I'm proud of.
I'm a Method actor. I spent years training for the drinking and carousing I had to do in this film.
I've been lucky enough to do a few films that will last longer than an opening weekend and those films are the ones I'm proud of.
There's no connection between al-Qaeda and Iraq.
I was in a bar and I said to a friend, 'You know, we've become those 40-year-old guys we used to look at and say, 'Isn't it sad?'
I just found out about 10 days ago that I must live 300 or 400 yards from Britney Spears... so now I have to move.