Top 90 Billy Bob Thornton Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Marketing is the devil.”

— Billy Bob Thornton

2. “I don’t have a fear of flying; I have a fear of crashing.”

— Billy Bob Thornton

3. “I’m kind of sad and happy all the time. Just kind of like feeling, you know, full of life and confident, and at the same time terrified. I’m all of those things at once.”

— Billy Bob Thornton

4. “Somewhere along the line we stopped believing we could do anything. And if we don’t have our dreams, we have nothing.”

— Billy Bob Thornton

5. “People want the truth but they only want the truth so they can talk bad about you on the blog or on television. They want you to tell them the truth and it screws everybody.”

— Billy Bob Thornton

6. “Life is magical and I guess my thing is I wish that people wanted that magic.”

— Billy Bob Thornton

7. “Man, I was drowning in sadness. And Angelina, she lifted me right up out of there.”

— Billy Bob Thornton

8. “Basically there are no stars anymore. The audience is the star.”

— Billy Bob Thornton

9. “I quit flying years ago. I don’t want to die with tourists.”

— Billy Bob Thornton

10. “My mom was a psychic. And there’s a movie called The Gift that I’d written years ago with Cate Blanchett which is loosely based on my mom.”

— Billy Bob Thornton

11. “At my dad’s funeral I didn’t cry when my dad died. I did it years later when I forgave him, which I’ve totally forgiven him and I loved my dad.”

— Billy Bob Thornton

12. “I was the fattest baby in Clark County, Arkansas. They put me in the newspaper. It was like a prize turnip.”

— Billy Bob Thornton

13. “If Michelle Pfeiffer gave Mel Gibson a vial of blood to wear around his neck in a movie you’d think it was terribly romantic, everyone would cry and they’d win awards. But in real life if someone does that they’d be considered weird.”

— Billy Bob Thornton

14. “I believe in running through the rain and crashing into the person you love and having your lips bleed on each other.”

— Billy Bob Thornton

15. “Sometimes we don’t want the bad guy to get caught because otherwise the story is over. You want to at least see it through to the end.”

— Billy Bob Thornton

16. “I worked as a roadie in the rock and roll business which was great fun. Very little money, very little food and the whole thing about the roadie’s lifestyle is great because all the groupies have to go through the roadies to get to the rock stars. It’s not necessarily true.”

— Billy Bob Thornton

17. “It’s not that I don’t understand it. But people think if you speak with an English accent it somehow makes you smarter.”

— Billy Bob Thornton

18. “There are rules in movies. I did a movie playing a bad cop who was a heroin addict but they wouldn’t let me smoke in a movie.”

— Billy Bob Thornton

19. “When people wear shoes that don’t fit them, it says something about their soul. Generally, I think it means they are good people.”

— Billy Bob Thornton

20. “Heavy role in the movies that I’ve done that I have loved and fit my soul; A Simple Plan, Monster’s Ball, Sling Blade, One False Move, Bad Santa even. I mean Bad Santa is a comedy, and it’s a very dark comedy, and it’s become like iconic, you know.”

— Billy Bob Thornton

21. “Normally you’re 21 years old and you look like Tom Cruise and you do a couple underwear commercials first and then you’re a movie star. That didn’t happen for me. So it was all quite overwhelming.”

— Billy Bob Thornton

22. “You can get famous for doing something stupid and empty, but you do something stupid and empty and you’re already famous, you lose your career.”

— Billy Bob Thornton

23. “Getting the nomination is like gravy. Winning would be like whatever is better than gravy.”

— Billy Bob Thornton

24. “My mom is such a big supporter of mine. She still is, and always was. So I got the sort of encouragement from that side of the family.”

— Billy Bob Thornton

25. “You can write when you’re dyslexic, you just can’t read it. But I started writing short stories as a child and I found the short story format a real nice one. I love short stories and I love short documentaries or short films of any kind.”

— Billy Bob Thornton

26. “I attribute all my success to ignorance. If you don’t ever think about not getting where you want to be, I think it helps you out.”

— Billy Bob Thornton

27. “I’ve gone through my periods. I’ve read the Bible completely, all the way through twice. I did it once when I was about 20 and I did it again when I was about 30.”

— Billy Bob Thornton

28. “Movies now, you can watch a trailer for a movie on TV now and you’re not sure if it’s a video game or a movie. You have to wait till the end of it to see, oh, I see, those actors are in it, so that one’s a movie. Oftentimes, it’s based on a video game.”

— Billy Bob Thornton

29. “Nothing wrong with computer as things. They can work wonders in communications and business and medicine and everything else.”

— Billy Bob Thornton

30. “I’ve never heard of anybody smoking a joint and going on a rampage. It makes you lie around on the floor and look at the ceiling. What’s wrong with that?”

— Billy Bob Thornton

31. “I don’t see anything wrong with a cell phone. That’s great. You have a flat tire in the middle of the night; it works better than digging in your pocket for a quarter and looking for a payphone eight miles down the road.”

— Billy Bob Thornton

32. “Movies these days have made killers into funny people. What’s that all about? I’ve got kids and family and friends, and I don’t like bad things. I don’t think they’re funny, and it’s irresponsible to make movies that don’t show you how that’s not good.”

— Billy Bob Thornton

33. “It’s the hardest thing in the world to be in a business where it’s all about people accepting you, and you have a desperate need to be accepted, and yet you live in a, you operate in a society that’s now very unaccepting.”

— Billy Bob Thornton

34. “I can’t sit through plays and musical theatre. I just want to run up onstage and mess up their hair and turn over the furniture.”

— Billy Bob Thornton

35. “You read something and you just feel this makes sense. And sometimes before you even read it you have a feeling that yeah, I’m probably gonna do this one.”

— Billy Bob Thornton

36. “When people are bothering you constantly when you’re trying to do just a simple thing that humans do every day but they won’t let you do it without bugging you about it, that was a hard thing. Because I became a movie star overnight. From a working actor and working writer to a movie star.”

— Billy Bob Thornton

37. “People think you have to be tortured or miserable to write, but I’m finding that I get inspired a lot more these days before I’m happy.”

— Billy Bob Thornton

38. “If someone is talking to you and tells you that you ought to do something, and you can tell they mean it, those are the scary people. Those are the people you want to watch out for.”

— Billy Bob Thornton

39. “People over 40 stay home and watch television, that’s why there are no movies out there.”

— Billy Bob Thornton

40. “I think people can live a religious life and yet believe in things maybe outside the box a little bit.”

— Billy Bob Thornton

41. “I’m an actor. I’m not a performer. I’m not like a song and dance guy who can take a cane and a hat and do it. I would just you know. That’s why I never did commercials.”

— Billy Bob Thornton

42. “When you’re a kid, somebody’s mid-forties, you think they’re an old man. Then you grow up and it’s like, I was a kid.”

— Billy Bob Thornton

43. “Acting is playing – it’s actually going out on a playground with the other kids and being in the game, and I need that. Writing satisfies that part of myself that longs to sit in my room and dream.”

— Billy Bob Thornton

44. “People a lot of times say that you know it must be hard to direct yourself. That’s a myth. It’s easier to direct yourself. There’s no middle man, you know.”

— Billy Bob Thornton

45. “I can’t imagine laying a finger on my kids. I go the other way and probably because my father was so abusive.”

— Billy Bob Thornton

46. “These days movies are cut very quickly and sort of fragmented and I tend to do slower moving stories where people develop relationships with people. I think I’d probably do a lot better if I lived in Europe – I think it’s more of a European sensibility somehow.”

— Billy Bob Thornton

47. “A lot of kids, when they go to church, they don’t really pay much attention to what they’re saying or whatever.”

— Billy Bob Thornton

48. “I know it’s boring to say this but I always start with the script. I mean if it’s well written and it’s a character that I haven’t necessarily played before.”

— Billy Bob Thornton

49. “I don’t like movies that are shot on green screen much, you know. I mean, I know that’s the thing to do, and I know that it’s getting. I’ll put it this way; David Lean would probably kill himself, you know, again if he knew that people were watching Lawrence of Arabia on a telephone.”

— Billy Bob Thornton

50. “I’ve been largely an improvisational actor for most of my career.”

— Billy Bob Thornton