I was born to play Hercules. I have loved and honored the mythology over the years – since I was a kid. When I first broke into Hollywood, ‚Hercules‘ was one of the movies that I – not chased, because I didn’t have the power to chase anything – but always had in the back of my mind.

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

I had nothing growing up, but I always wanted to be ‚sexy,‘ even before I knew what the word was.

Ever since I was a little kid, I wanted to be in combat.

Plagiarism is always the biggest thing in Hollywood.

All my stories are like the Greek and Roman myths, and the Egyptian myths, and the Old and New Testament.

I went by myself to Hollywood, I spoke no English, every day I had to go to school.

It’s nice to finally get scripts offered to me that aren’t the ones Tom Hanks wipes his butt with.

I’m looking forward to becoming a marvelous – excuse the word marvelous – character actress. like Marie Dressler, like Will Rogers.

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

I’m not really a Hollywood person. Not that I don’t like L.A., but I’m just a Northern California guy.

Like other kids wanted to become firemen or astronauts, I wanted to make people laugh.

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.

I sure lost my musical direction in Hollywood. My songs were the same conveyer belt mass production, just like most of my movies were.

When I was growing up, I wanted to adopt, because I was aware there were kids that didn’t have parents.

The story being told in ‚Star Wars‘ is a classic one. Every few hundred years, the story is retold because we have a tendency to do the same things over and over again. Power corrupts, and when you’re in charge, you start doing things that you think are right, but they’re actually not.

As a small child in England, I had this dream of going to Africa. We didn’t have any money and I was a girl, so everyone except my mother laughed at it. When I left school, there was no money for me to go to university, so I went to secretarial college and got a job.

It was 1996 and I was at a crossroads in my career. I had been working in Hollywood as a writer and was very unhappy. I had pitched an idea for a book some six months earlier, and the book packager, Joost Elffers, wanted me to write up a treatment for it.

I don’t know if high society is different in other cities, but in Hollywood, important people can’t stand to be invited someplace that isn’t full of other important people. They don’t mind a few unfamous people being present because they make good listeners.

I really hope someday in Hollywood, some producer or director will hire me only to do drama.

India has 2,000,000 gods and worships them all. In religion, all other countries are paupers; India is the only millionaire.

Dakota Fanning is a child, but she is a wonderful actor. I don’t know what a child actor is. She’s an actor who’s a child.

I never expected anyone to take care of me, but in my wildest dreams and juvenile yearnings, I wanted the house with the picket fence from June Allyson movies. I knew that was yearning like one yearns to fly.

Hollywood is a place where they’ll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your soul.

The quote-unquote ‚description‘ of a leading man was once your tall, handsome man with the build of whatever, almost a trophy to some degree. I think now it’s about making a leading man what you want a leading man to be. In this day, you can’t deny talent. You look at Jonah Hill, you look at Zach Galifianakis, you look at myself.

I’d done a lot of research in Hollywood and in academia. I love research and so I wanted to kind of ground the book in history, in things that I read that were universal and timeless and then kind of let my own experiences sort of filter through all of this history.

I didn’t come to Hollywood. Hollywood came to me. A lot of people wish they could say the things I say. Everyone out here is so phony, it’s sickening.

As a kid, we would drive up and down 77 North – that’s our highway – there would be office buildings on the side of the highway and I’d be like, that’s what my house is going to look like when I get older. I’m going to start making my house look like this.

An actress is not a machine, but they treat you like a machine. A money machine.

For ‚Hercules,‘ I went for the demigod look: big and mean. When you’re playing a character like the son of Zeus, you only get one shot.

What’s fascinating is, people in Washington would rather spend time in Hollywood, and people in Hollywood would rather spend time in Washington.

Meryl Streep is exactly as awesome as you would imagine Meryl Streep to be.

When you have box-office results, Hollywood treats you different. Hollywood stands up. Once you get to the point where Hollywood sees that you create results, then the demand for you becomes higher.

The connection between psychology, mythology, and literature is as important as the connection between psychology and biology and the hard sciences.

In Hollywood, they think they know it all. You, as a writer, are essentially an outsider. Novelists and short-story writers, especially.

I wanted to become an illustrator as a child.

There are a lot of conservative people, a lot of moderate people, Republicans, Democrats, in Hollywood. It is just that the conservative people by the nature of the word itself play closer to the vest. They do not go around hot dogging it.

I seem to be getting a lot of things pushed my way that are strong women. It’s like people see Hackers and they send me offers to play tough women with guns, the kind who wear no bra and a little tank top. I’d like to play strong women who are also very feminine.

I personally don’t like to go see romantic comedies. But people do want to see them, and they seem to want to see me in them.

When I was a boy, I always saw myself as a hero in comic books and in movies. I grew up believing this dream.

I came to Hollywood and within a decade I was one of the biggest action stars of all time.

I think the bottom of the totem pole is African-American women, or women of colour. I think they get the least opportunities in Hollywood.

Later on they send me to Hollywood. To make movies. It was all new to me. I was only 21 years old.

All your Western theologies, the whole mythology of them, are based on the concept of God as a senile delinquent.

When other little girls wanted to be ballet dancers I kind of wanted to be a vampire.

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.

I’ve been fortunate to have had the life I had prior to Hollywood. I wasn’t starving; I was going to eat the next day.

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

As a young kid, I really wanted to be rich.

If a great opportunity opens itself up, I would love to be involved… or star in a movie.

Exceeds man’s might: that dwells with the gods above.

Space has always fascinated me. As a young boy looking up at the stars, I found it impossible to resist thinking what was out there and if I ever would experience space first-hand.

I will never win an Oscar, and do you know why? First of all, because I’m not Jewish. Secondly, I make too much money for all those old farts in the Academy.

In Hollywood a girl’s virtue is much less important than her hairdo.

Atlas was permitted the opinion that he was at liberty, if he wished, to drop the Earth and creep away; but this opinion was all that he was permitted.

First, I’m trying to prove to myself that I’m a person. Then maybe I’ll convince myself that I’m an actress.

As a child, when asked what I would be, I usually said I was going to be a huntsman. A fine profession, truly!

I used to think as I looked out on the Hollywood night, ‚There must be thousands of girls sitting alone like me dreaming of being a movie star.‘ But I’m not going to worry about them. I’m dreaming the hardest.

The average Hollywood film star’s ambition is to be admired by an American, courted by an Italian, married to an Englishman and have a French boyfriend.

I’m already the face of the UFC, plus the face of boxing, WWE, and Hollywood.

It is no surprise that animation is Hollywood’s most successful and innovative genre.