Top 100 James Franco Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I got arrested for graffiti. I got arrested – a lot of, like, underage drinking, drunk in public, shoplifting, you know, your various, like, suburban arrests, I guess.”

— James Franco

52. “Always have one artistic thing that is pure, at least one thing, where you don’t compromise. You can do other things to make money, but have one pure area.”

— James Franco

53. “There’s so much pressure put on relationships to deliver the satisfaction of life. And to me, that is just not the answer. I feel like it should be something in addition to what you love or be a part of that.”

— James Franco

54. “Adapting a book is essentially a collaboration, whether the author is alive or dead.”

— James Franco

55. “We fell in love last night. He’s the coolest guy.”

— James Franco

56. “A lot of the people in San Francisco think of themselves as healers – not just as people delivering this base service, but giving their clients spiritual help. It’s almost like being an actor, playing a different part for each trick.”

— James Franco

57. “Sometimes I think to myself, what should James Franco say next? And then it comes to me. Boobs.”

— James Franco

58. “I’m starting to teach now: I teach in the graduate film program at NYU and next year I’m going to be teaching at Los Angeles at the film program and English program at UCLA.”

— James Franco

59. “Fight scenes are really more like dances than they are fights, because you’re depending on your partner to do the right move at the right time. Yes, a tough person or somebody who knows what they’re doing will look better in a fight scene, but it also has a lot to do with the other person.”

— James Franco

60. “Not having any real direction, one writer would lead me to another.”

— James Franco

61. “This was the way the night had cashed in. Choices had been made and things happened, and here we were. It was sad, and funny. My life was made of this. Stuff like this.”

— James Franco

62. “I don’t cast somebody that I think is like my younger self.”

— James Franco

63. “You just don’t really rehearse kissing scenes, whether it’s male or female.”

— James Franco

64. “I always see nice images like that but I don’t know what to do with them. I guess you share them with someone. Or you write them down in a poem. I had so many of those little images, but I never shared them or wrote any of them down.”

— James Franco

65. “I drank from the bottle again and it was a scary plunge because I always wanted to take too much. It hurt, but it was also impressive, like being in the hands of a bigger force. And because of that, a relief.”

— James Franco

66. “I learned a lot of good things in my school. I’ve audited a lot of other schools, and I guess after a while I got a little tired of the acting school atmosphere.”

— James Franco

67. “Sometimes it is painful to be oneself; at other times it seems impossible to escape oneself.”

— James Franco

68. “You are successful if you are able to work on the kind of material that you want to – if your life conforms to your dreams, regardless of outside acceptance or acclaim.”

— James Franco

69. “For some reason, when I was in junior high school, my friends and I had, like, a cologne-stealing ring.”

— James Franco

70. “Most of the books that I’ve adapted I’m doing because I love the book and I feel like it’s a great work of art in itself, and when it’s a great book I feel as a director or a writer that I have a responsibility to rise to the level of the original. It makes me try to reach higher.”

— James Franco

71. “There’s this phenomenon where people do like to announce movies that they think I’m doing that I’m not.”

— James Franco

72. “It’s like low-budget filmmaking – a focus on dialogue and relationships over plot. Quirky. Improv.”

— James Franco

73. “But I don’t want to die! I have so much to do!”

— James Franco

74. “When I was a child, I wanted to be an actor, but I had really bad buckteeth. I didn’t want to get braces, but my mom said I couldn’t be an actor if I didn’t get the braces. So, I got the braces.”

— James Franco

75. “I worked the drive-through at McDonald’s and tried out different accents – Italian, Russian, Irish.”

— James Franco

76. “Almost all the movies I’ve directed are adaptations. And I think what I found when I went to film school, where they try to push you to find your voice or your thing, is that I got a lot of things out of adaptations.”

— James Franco

77. “I don’t like sleeping in a bed.”

— James Franco

78. “I was a black center in the middle of all the nature. I was nothing, but I could do anything.”

— James Franco

79. “We tell specific stories about ourselves to ourselves and we’re all the heroes of our own lives. But you live through certain experiences with other people, and sometimes they have very different takes on what happened.”

— James Franco

80. “Directing, editing, and everything about filmmaking has definitely changed me as an actor.”

— James Franco

81. “It’s hard when you’re doing a film based on a true story to really figure out what all those relationships were.”

— James Franco

82. “School allowed me to have outlets so that some of the pressure was taken off the acting. Every role in every movie, I used to live or die by. Once I had these new outlets, I relaxed a lot more.”

— James Franco

83. “The new critique you’re gonna start hearing about James Franco, is ‘He’s spreading himself too thin.’”

— James Franco

84. “I start movies with people that I believe in and people with visions, you know, that I believe in. And so if it doesn’t kind of come together in the right way, at least I was doing it because I believed in the person and the movie.”

— James Franco

85. “I think it helps the writers to sell their books if they announce my attachment. But it doesn’t mean that I’m going to make the movies in the next year or two or three.”

— James Franco

86. “I’ve come to a point where I just want to do movies that I just believe in. I have come to an understanding of filmmaking, a new understanding where I believe it’s a director’s medium. That means working with people that I believe in.”

— James Franco

87. “I needed an outlet in high school and came across painting. I’ve actually been painting longer than I’ve been acting. A movie is a collaborative effort, and with painting you just have yourself.”

— James Franco

88. “It’s basically the best job in the world. If you’re fortunate enough – and I consider myself fortunate – you get to work with your friends and you get to work on projects that interest you.”

— James Franco

89. “If many people love me, then I must be important.”

— James Franco

90. “I am not going to be the guy who’s not pulling his weight.”

— James Franco

91. “I personally just love movies about the creative process.”

— James Franco

92. “I worked at a McDonald’s drive-through. I could always tell when girls were interested: They’d drive around again and say, ‘I forgot something.’”

— James Franco

93. “I become kind of obsessive about research.”

— James Franco

94. “There’s a long tradition of teen comedies where the kids are getting drunk on beer and whatever else, so smoking a joint to me is no worse than having a beer. So, if someone has a problem with it, I’ll just tell them to relax.”

— James Franco

95. “I love collaboration of all kinds, and I love the way that collaboration pulls me into directions I wouldn’t go in if I was working on my own.”

— James Franco

96. “For whatever reason, I have an emotional life that wants to come out.”

— James Franco

97. “There’s no relationship that I find that’s closer than a creative relationship.”

— James Franco

98. “I love that the idea of examining memory, and the way memory is edited was made more interesting because it was being filtered through a writer.”

— James Franco

99. “We all age. You shouldn’t discount it as a subject for a film. Just because the characters are dealing with issues that you might not deal with for another 45 years doesn’t mean you won’t like it.”

— James Franco

100. “When I started writing after my career as an actor, I knew that that other life in the film industry would be pulled into my writing life and that people would see me not as an author but as an actor starting to write.”

— James Franco