I love acting, truly my favorite people are actors.
Sean Penn
We’ve let the blade of our innocence dull over time, and it’s only in innocence that you find any kind of magic, any kind of courage.
Sean Penn
Haiti kind of gets a hold of you.
Sean Penn
There’s a lot of mediocrity being celebrated, and a lot of wonderful stuff being ignored or discouraged.
Sean Penn
There is no shame in my saying that we all want to be loved by someone. As I look back over my life in romance, I don’t feel I’ve ever had that.
Sean Penn
I’m a huge Woody Allen fan. Good movie, bad movie, it doesn’t matter – I just like his movies.
Sean Penn
I think we all have light and dark inside us.
Sean Penn
Child-rearing is my main interest now. I’m a hands-on father.
Sean Penn
I’ve never really been one to get what they call stage fright so much.
Sean Penn
I don’t have any particular excitement about working with any specific director or actor at this point.
Sean Penn
Yeah, I had a tremendous time shooting in Nebraska. I like that state a lot, all over it.
Sean Penn
I am a limousine liberal.
Sean Penn
When you act in a film, you’re inevitably surrounded by people you didn’t choose, right down to the set painter. I like being able to pick the family I’m waking up to in the morning that’s going to make this group effort to tell a story that applies to what’s interesting to me at that stage in my life.
Sean Penn
The bottom line is, you love your wife, you do your best with that.
Sean Penn
Somewhere along the line, the actions of this government are the actions of me.
Sean Penn
I think life’s an irrational obsession.
Sean Penn
Oh, I’m a big-mouth. I said a lot of things.
Sean Penn
Marriage ain’t easy, but it’s great most of the time.
Sean Penn
I like to believe that love is a reciprocal thing, that it can’t really be felt, truly, by one.
Sean Penn
I love stories about people who are smart enough to know that what they’re doing is destroying them, but that knowing that doesn’t help them.
Sean Penn
My favorite thing to do is not act – it’s that simple.
Sean Penn
I really love to make movies.
Sean Penn
In between, I go broke because I seem to do movies where you’re not paid a lot as an actor.
Sean Penn
There’s not a lot of good movies being made.
Sean Penn
If you’re willing to put two thoughts into a picture then you’re already ahead of the game.
Sean Penn
Sacrificing American soldiers or innocent civilians in an unprecedented preemptive attack on a separate sovereign nation may well prove itself a most temporary medicine.
Sean Penn
Love is a mess, at best, and I figure it can be very real in spite of all the things people try to attach to it.
Sean Penn
Yeah, I had actually tried to stop acting before I made Dead Man Walking.
Sean Penn
It has nothing to do with the emotional demands of a role; I’ve done comedies that are as draining to me as any drama.
Sean Penn
You try to do your best at what you’re getting paid for.
Sean Penn
Well, look at all of these summer blockbusters. You can’t help but laugh a little, because you’ve already seen a lot of these movies 482 times.
Sean Penn
On any movie I’m involved with, I say what I think.
Sean Penn
There is no re-inventing the wheel.
Sean Penn
So if we have anything original to offer, it’s to speak from our own life about the society we’re in.
Sean Penn
What happens is things come to you – director, script – and if you respond to it, it’s because it’s tapping into some part of what’s inside you, and different roles tap into different parts.
Sean Penn
I’m not a breakfast eater.
Sean Penn
That on a romantic level, if you feel it about somebody and it’s pure, it means that they do too.
Sean Penn
Well, I think that when you direct a movie or write it. And in the case of the two movies I did, I wrote and directed, they occupy a special place for you.
Sean Penn
There are a few directors around who I have some excitement about spending my $7 at the theatre watching their movies.
Sean Penn
I think you start to prepare the minute you read something.
Sean Penn
At this stage, what would be rewarding would be for audiences to want to watch.
Sean Penn
I think that I’ve still not been successful at playing the role of the retired actor, and I’d like to work on that.
Sean Penn
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.
Sean Penn
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 Penn
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.
Sean Penn
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 Penn
I just want real creative freedom without worrying about, you know, car payments.
Sean Penn
In my teens, I fell in love with the movies.
Sean Penn
When I was growing up and somebody like Robert De Niro had a movie come out, it was a cultural event. Because he had such a confidence and a single mission that was so intimate.
Sean Penn
In school, I was a genius of the year preceding the year I was in, every year.
Sean Penn
Selling a movie feels like a hustle to every bone in my body. Many actors have careers dominated by modeling. They’re all over the place. It turns me off. People who are good at what they do ought to practice something bigger.
Sean Penn
I choose movies that I think will speak to what’s important.
Sean Penn