If I close my eyes and think of Hollywood, all I see is one big varicose vein.

Every man casts a shadow; not his body only, but his imperfectly mingled spirit. This is his grief. Let him turn which way he will, it falls opposite to the sun; short at noon, long at eve. Did you never see it?

When I was a kid, I loved Elvis, and Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones. But I had no connection to Hollywood – and being a movie star was such a far-fetched idea, growing up in Hawaii.

Science is nothing but perception.

Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than looking.

If you change and adapt your persona, you are seen as inauthentic; if you stay the angry young man, you fade from attention or seem tiresome.

I live in Hollywood, but you can’t make me love Hollywood. I’ll never love Hollywood.

To us also, through every star, through every blade of grass, is not God made visible if we will open our minds and our eyes.

If I want to be called ‚The Rock,‘ I’ll be called ‚The Rock.‘ If I want to go back to wrestling, I’ll go back to wrestling.

Every time I make American film I just trust American directors and American writers.

Wisdom stands at the turn in the road and calls upon us publicly, but we consider it false and despise its adherents.

I’m not in the loop; I don’t know any actors, really, just the ones I work with.

A reader can never tell if it’s a real thimble or an imaginary thimble, because by the time you’re reading it, they’re the same. It’s a thimble. It’s in the book.

More than anything else, I want the folks back at home to think right of me.

There are very few people who really appreciate my shows. People come to the show and they pay and they enjoy it, but I don’t really think most people really understand what they’ve seen.

A person who is gifted sees the essential point and leaves the rest as surplus.

Things are more like they are now than they ever were before.

Ninety percent of all music is always crap, and when too many people decide they’re going to have guitar bands, then ninety percent of them are going to be crap. It’s just a given law.

Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers. In the perfect stranger we perceive man himself; the image of a God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of wisdom of a mustache.

An idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.

Imaginary evils soon become real one by indulging our reflections on them.

How we experience memory sometimes, it’s not linear. We’re not telling the stories to ourselves. We know the story; we’re just seeing it in flashes overlaid.

Celebrity life and media culture are probably the most overbearing pop-cultural conditions that we as young people have to deal with, because it forces us to judge ourselves.

A man’s only as old as the woman he feels.

Too many of us look upon Americans as dollar chasers. This is a cruel libel, even if it is reiterated thoughtlessly by the Americans themselves.

There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.

If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.

What we wish, we readily believe, and what we ourselves think, we imagine others think also.

There’s this lingering philosophy that movie stars shouldn’t do TV.

That little Miley Cyrus… she’s like a little Elvis. The kids love her because she’s Hannah Montana, but what people don’t realize about her is she is such a fantastic singer and songwriter. She writes songs like she’s 40 years old!

I have a big box of autographs. I took photographs of me and Marlene Dietrich, me and Ida Lupino. I took pictures of Myrna Loy and Joel McCrea in front of the studios. I loved Hollywood. I have 500 autographs and 500 photographs I took.

A great social success is a pretty girl who plays her cards as carefully as if she were plain.

I know that a large part of my fan base is gay. They’ve shown me love from the start. I mean in this industry, everyone from my glam people to my dancers are gay. You can’t be homophobic in this line of work – I’m a pop star!

Is there a sharper commentary on American culture and the world than The Simpsons?

In Hollywood you can see things at night that are fast enough to be in the Olympics in the day time.

Meryl and Katharine Hepburn are probably the two greatest actresses of this and the last century.

Not everyone can see the truth, but he can be it.

The universe as we know it is a joint product of the observer and the observed.

If a star or studio chief or any other great movie personages find themselves sitting among a lot of nobodies, they get frightened – as if somebody was trying to demote them.

When it comes down to it, glam rock was all very amusing. At the time, it was funny, then a few years later it became sort of serious-looking and a bit foreboding.

There is an optical illusion about every person we meet.

Michelle Pfeiffer hasn’t been finding a lot of work recently because she doesn’t like what a woman her age is offered. That’s a real double standard. You get Sean Connery, who gets older and older, still playing opposite young ladies, but it doesn’t work the other way around.

I have never had plastic surgery, and there are many pop singers who have.

The true face of smoking is disease, death and horror – not the glamour and sophistication the pushers in the tobacco industry try to portray.

I have no use for people who throw their weight around as celebrities, or for those who fawn over you just because you are famous.

The future of American film lies on television.

‚Tis best to weigh the enemy more mighty than he seems.

Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.

I’ve seen too many ups and downs in the movie industry.

No accurate thinker will judge another person by that which the other person’s enemies say about him.

For, if a good speaker, never so eloquent, does not see into the fact, and is not speaking the truth of that – is there a more horrid kind of object in creation?

I’ve always felt toward the slightest scene, even if all I had to do in a scene was just to come in and say, ‚Hi,‘ that the people ought to get their money’s worth and that this is an obligation of mine, to give them the best you can get from me.

People often think I’m a faker, but I’m usually honest, in a certain way – in such a way that often nobody believes me!

I was going to Miami quite a lot at the time, speaking a lot of Spanish with my friends from Cuba – Lana Del Rey reminded us of the glamour of the seaside. It sounded gorgeous coming off the tip of the tongue.

The long time to come when I shall not exist has more effect on me than this short present time, which nevertheless seems endless.

Age is whatever you think it is. You are as old as you think you are.

The ‚I think‘ which Kant said must be able to accompany all my objects, is the ‚I breathe‘ which actually does accompany them.

Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.

I find in my poetry and prose the rhythms and imagery of the best – I mean, when I’m at my best – of the good Southern black preachers. The lyricism of the spirituals and the directness of gospel songs and the mystery of blues are in my music or in my poetry and prose, or I missed everything.

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.

Whatever deceives men seems to produce a magical enchantment.