Top 200 Jack Nicholson Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “I mean, it’s real hard to be free when you’re bought and sold in the marketplace.”

— Jack Nicholson

152. “I’m such a perfectionist. I always feel overpraised or whatever. In the abstract, I know I’m a good person, a good professional. But it’s nice to be noticed a little bit, ain’t it?”

— Jack Nicholson

153. “Acting is everybody’s favorite second job.”

— Jack Nicholson

154. “Sometimes a bit of distance can be very healthy. You can go away by yourself on a trip and come back very glad to be with your partner because you’ve cleared your head out of all the negativity.”

— Jack Nicholson

155. “No issue is more compelling than the air we breathe, be it hot or cold, be it hawk or human.”

— Jack Nicholson

156. “I come from the Lynchs of Sligo. You know, I went there, but I looked in the phone book and there are nine million Lynches in Sligo.”

— Jack Nicholson

157. “I hate giving advice, because people won’t take it.”

— Jack Nicholson

158. “I resist all established beliefs. My religion basically is to be immediate, to live in the now.”

— Jack Nicholson

159. “Almost everybody’s happy to be a fool for love.”

— Jack Nicholson

160. “I goddamn near lost my nose. And I like it. I like breathing through it.”

— Jack Nicholson

161. “If men are honest, everything they do and everywhere they go is for a chance to see women.”

— Jack Nicholson

162. “I’ve always thought basketball was the best sport, although it wasn’t the sport I was best at. It was just the most fun to watch.”

— Jack Nicholson

163. “Played tennis for years. But you can’t improve at tennis after you’re 50. You get to be in your 40s, and suddenly you’re a doubles player.”

— Jack Nicholson

164. “I’m the age where we didn’t have television as kids. So when I saw my nieces and nephews watching Howdy Doody, Kukla, Fran and Ollie, and so forth, I thought the world had gone mad.”

— Jack Nicholson

165. “I’m content with the fact that I made a decent effort. That’s what I’ve always worried about: that I wouldn’t try hard enough.”

— Jack Nicholson

166. “You can follow the action, which gets you good pictures. You can follow your instincts, which will probably get you in trouble. Or, you can follow the money, which nine times out of ten will get you closer to the truth.”

— Jack Nicholson

167. “I envy people of faith. I’m incapable of believing in anything supernatural.”

— Jack Nicholson

168. “I certainly knew my father. He just didn’t happen to be my biological father.”

— Jack Nicholson

169. “If you get an impulse in a scene, no matter how wrong it seems, follow the impulse. It might be something and if it ain’t – take two!”

— Jack Nicholson

170. “I guess this proves there are as many nuts in the Academy as anywhere else.”

— Jack Nicholson

171. “In my last year of school, I was voted Class Optimist and Class Pessimist. Looking back, I realize I was only half right.”

— Jack Nicholson

172. “I wasn’t a babe in the woods. I’d watched a lot of stars, from James Dean to Brando, and I’d seen everybody alive work at MGM. I had a certain old-timer’s quality, even though I was young and new, and drew on what I believed before I made it.”

— Jack Nicholson

173. “I only take Viagra when I’m with more than one woman.”

— Jack Nicholson

174. “I take responsibility for my successes as well as my failures. But when I look at my professional mistakes, I’m always left with the feeling that maybe I should have done more.”

— Jack Nicholson

175. “Believe it or not, I supported Richard Nixon on the issue of presidential privilege. How could anyone conceive of being the president of the United States and think that every single thing that you say or do can become a part of the public record? It just seems so stupid to me.”

— Jack Nicholson

176. “I’m not hard to get along with.”

— Jack Nicholson

177. “I was particularly proud of my performance as the Joker. I considered it a piece of pop art.”

— Jack Nicholson

178. “I’m Irish. I think about death all the time.”

— Jack Nicholson

179. “Dissembling is a common tool of the anger junkie.”

— Jack Nicholson

180. “A lot of people can’t remember things because they weren’t actually there to begin with – they don’t take it all in.”

— Jack Nicholson

181. “In this industry, there are only two ways up the ladder. Rung by rung or claw your way to the top. It’s sure been tough on my nails.”

— Jack Nicholson

182. “There is one thing I know about creative conflict: once my argument is exhausted, I am not going to be unhappy whether it moves in my direction or away.”

— Jack Nicholson

183. “Kids are life’s only guaranteed, bona fide upside surprise.”

— Jack Nicholson

184. “Early on, if I was alone two three nights in a row, I’d start writing poems about suicide.”

— Jack Nicholson

185. “We learn how to kiss, or to drink, talk to our buddies-all the things that you can’t really teach in social studies or history-we all learn them at the movies.”

— Jack Nicholson

186. “For an actor, style comes last. You first have to implement the whole thing, but your style comes from the subconscious, which is the best part an actor brings to his work.”

— Jack Nicholson

187. “When I was in high school, I earned the pimple award and every other gross-out award.”

— Jack Nicholson

188. “There were points in my life where I felt oddly irresistible to women. I’m not in that state now and that makes me sad.”

— Jack Nicholson

189. “I’ve never lost a friend over work. I come from a small-town environment and I remember my childhood impressions that, if you were a conniver or a fink or whatever, everybody knew about it and you were a louse for the rest of your life. So I never lost those values in some way.”

— Jack Nicholson

190. “I’m in the movie business; it’s meant to be very cutthroat. But you won’t find anybody that ever says I cheated them or manipulated them.”

— Jack Nicholson

191. “Everyone pretty much acknowledges that he’s the man, and I still feel that underrates him.”

— Jack Nicholson

192. “It’s the post-literate generation that is most disturbing to a movie-maker. The explosions and the knifings. People like to go to what’s hot and you can’t get past a certain gross unless you involve children who go more than once.”

— Jack Nicholson

193. “I think that’s what distinguishes Schmidt, really. In the movies now, so much of what is appealing to an audience is the dramatic or has to do with science fiction, and Schmidt is simply human. There’s no melodrama; there’s no device, It’s just about a human being.”

— Jack Nicholson

194. “I’d give my goddamned soul for just a glass of beer.”

— Jack Nicholson

195. “I don’t play golf competitively. I tell everybody that I cheat so they won’t gamble with me. That’s why you can’t watch football. Everybody’s gambling. They don’t want to watch the game; they watch the spread.”

— Jack Nicholson

196. “I used to be very quick, I would be able to leave the room and be back before you noticed. When you can’t do that anymore you need to change the style of how you do things. But I’m very interested in life and you don’t want to lose that.”

— Jack Nicholson

197. “A star on a movie set is like a time bomb. That bomb has got to be defused so people can approach it without fear.”

— Jack Nicholson

198. “Everybody’s old enough for a beer, ain’t that right, Mule?”

— Jack Nicholson

199. “The fuel for the sports fan is the ability to have private theories.”

— Jack Nicholson

200. “I can’t hit on women in public any more. I didn’t decide this; it just doesn’t feel right at my age.”

— Jack Nicholson