Top 200 Jack Nicholson Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “I always knew there wasn’t going to be anybody to help me and emotionally support me, that whatever I did I’d have to do on my own.”

— Jack Nicholson

52. “We are going as fast as we can as soon as we can. We’re in a race against time, until we run out of money.”

— Jack Nicholson

53. “A man needs a private life. With no ability to have a private life, one thing leads to another, and before you know it we have Bill and Monica. We need to get real about things. Humans are humans. Why should we expect more?”

— Jack Nicholson

54. “If you think you’re attractive, you’re always attractive.”

— Jack Nicholson

55. “I am a person who is trained to look other people in the eye.”

— Jack Nicholson

56. “Here comes Johnny!”

— Jack Nicholson

57. “Staying together is a challenge. We all have to accept qualities in other people that aren’t always exactly what we want or need.”

— Jack Nicholson

58. “I don’t believe in God now. I can still work up an envy for someone who has a faith. I can see how that could be a deeply soothing experience.”

— Jack Nicholson

59. “What’s beautiful is all that counts, pal. That’s ALL that counts.”

— Jack Nicholson

60. “I’ve been too many places. I’m like the bad penny.”

— Jack Nicholson

61. “I would never complain about my life, even though I really would like to have a mate.”

— Jack Nicholson

62. “I never had a policy about marriage. I got married very young in life and I always think in all relationships, I’ve always thought that it’s counterproductive to have a theory on that.”

— Jack Nicholson

63. “I don’t want to direct a movie as good as Antonioni, or Kubrick, or Polanski, or whoever. I want it to be my own. I think I’ve got the seed of it and, what’s more, that I can make movies that are different and informed by my taste.”

— Jack Nicholson

64. “I want my kids to have a deep, inner feeling that it’s alright to be happy, that you don’t have to be constantly manufacturing problems that you don’t really have.”

— Jack Nicholson

65. “Being pigeonholed is the death of all actors.”

— Jack Nicholson

66. “I didn’t know that my sister was really my mother until I was thirty-seven years old. But life has taught me that there have been a lot of things that I didn’t know.”

— Jack Nicholson

67. “I love women who have a strong sense of themselves because I know I have a pretty good idea of what I want out of life and I like to be around other people who are also pretty secure. It just makes things easier.”

— Jack Nicholson

68. “Age is the first limitation on roles that I’ve ever had to encounter, and I hit that awhile ago.”

— Jack Nicholson

69. “Frankly, I got into the movies because I like the movies a lot.”

— Jack Nicholson

70. “I’m definitely still wild at heart.”

— Jack Nicholson

71. “I don’t even own a cell phone.”

— Jack Nicholson

72. “You are more thoughtful because you don’t act as quickly anymore. When I turned 70 it was the first time I felt young for my age. Fifty dropped on me like a ton of bricks – there is something about that number – but when 70 came along I felt good about it.”

— Jack Nicholson

73. “Having kids is the most innately positive thing that anyone can do.”

— Jack Nicholson

74. “I would never say, “I’m retired.” I believe if I decided to just not work, in six months everybody would just forget whether you were working or not.”

— Jack Nicholson

75. “Well, a younger woman is a type, but not necessarily a type for me. And what is a younger woman? I mean, I’m pretty old. Almost everyone is younger.”

— Jack Nicholson

76. “There’s probably no one who understands Method acting better academically than I do, or actually uses it more in his work. But it’s funny – nobody really sees that. It’s perception versus reality, I suppose.”

— Jack Nicholson

77. “Through all permutations and youthful poetry, I came to believe that the film actor was the great “literateur” of his time.”

— Jack Nicholson

78. “Women are sort of like motorcycle gangs with me. They get really shy and polite. I don’t know why.”

— Jack Nicholson

79. “The most difficult thing about being well known? Getting out of a hotel room at 4am.”

— Jack Nicholson

80. “My whole career strategy has been to build a base so that I could take the roles I want to play. I’d hate to think that a shorter part might not be available because I was worried about my billing.”

— Jack Nicholson

81. “Many actors will try something different once, but if it isn’t a box office success they’ll never do it again. In my opinion, there’s no point in going on with this job if you do the same thing over and over again.”

— Jack Nicholson

82. “I don’t have any plugs or tucks but people do what they want. I look at it as mutilation.”

— Jack Nicholson

83. “There are major influences on us that people are not aware of. There are big lies that nobody’s willing to discuss.”

— Jack Nicholson

84. “Men dominate because of physicality, and thus they have mercy where women do not.”

— Jack Nicholson

85. “You’re anachronistic when you know that your feelings aren’t going to have any effect on anything.”

— Jack Nicholson

86. “I’m fairly well off. I can’t poor-mouth that away from people’s sensibilities about me, which is something I worry about as an actor. But it would be real stupid of me to do something for the money.”

— Jack Nicholson

87. “I used to think that one of the great signs of security was the ability to just walk away.”

— Jack Nicholson

88. “I’m against cronyism, and I had to learn that early on. Like, I don’t have an entourage, because I saw the negative effects of those things.”

— Jack Nicholson

89. “As an actor, I want to give in to the collaboration with the director because I don’t want my work to be all the same. The more this can be done with comfort, the more variety my work has had.”

— Jack Nicholson

90. “There’s a period just before you start a movie when you start thinking, I don’t know what in the world I’m going to do. It’s free-floating anxiety. In my case, though, this is over by lunch the first day of shooting.”

— Jack Nicholson

91. “It always bothered me when people came off stage and were told how great they were. They weren’t, really, in my opinion. It was then I started thinking that, contrary to conventional wisdom, film was the artful medium for the actor, not the stage.”

— Jack Nicholson

92. “I’m a New Wave baby, so I got very stimulated by foreign film.”

— Jack Nicholson

93. “If you’re going to write, write one poem all your life, let nobody read it, and then burn it. This is very young thinking, I confess, but it is the seminal part of my life.”

— Jack Nicholson

94. “I just know that sameness, repetition, and conceptualizing are the acting craft’s adversaries, and it seems more intelligent to start off within a framework where those things are, to some degree, taken out of your hands.”

— Jack Nicholson

95. “I’m a scamp. I don’t deny it. I like myself.”

— Jack Nicholson

96. “There are short parts that I as an actor am very right for. Or I just like the part. Or you need someone like me for the movie. By that I don’t mean at the box office, I mean in the execution of the material.”

— Jack Nicholson

97. “I believe in making all movies at their most reasonable. That I get a lot of money as an actor is because nobody else will get it if I don’t.”

— Jack Nicholson

98. “Because you know, down deep in my heart, when all is said and done, I still live under the illusion that basically people think of me as an up-and-coming young actor.”

— Jack Nicholson

99. “Financially, I’ve lost money and made money, but I know my way around financially.”

— Jack Nicholson

100. “I suppose I can do more for a script as an actor than as a writer – in the film sense.”

— Jack Nicholson