Top 120 John Malkovich Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “In New York in the Forties or Fifties, everybody’s in a suit, an overcoat and a hat.”

— John Malkovich

52. “I’m not a control maniac.”

— John Malkovich

53. “Some directors expect you to do everything; write, be producer, psychiatrist. Some just want you to die in a tragic accident during the shooting so they can get the insurance.”

— John Malkovich

54. “My father could be very distancing. My clearest memory is of him squatting, watering plants for hours and hours at a time, completely silent. He was very self-contained; my mother was more outgoing and chatty and social. I’m certainly more like her.”

— John Malkovich

55. “And may the best of you – for it will only be the best of you, and even then only in the rarest and briefest moments – succeed in framing that most basic of questions, ‘how do we live?’”

— John Malkovich

56. “The one natural gift I have is easy access. That’s the only natural I gift I have at all. You have to have that, the third eye.”

— John Malkovich

57. “I find it hard to pre-plan every element of everything I do. It’s not my thing.”

— John Malkovich

58. “When I have failed as an actor I’ve always thought it was my fault. But when I direct something, I wouldn’t want the actors to think it was their fault.”

— John Malkovich

59. “It’s tough to figure out how do we compete in Europe and North America, when obviously a living wage for us is very different than a living wage in Indonesia.”

— John Malkovich

60. “I like design, I like details, to me it is just another form of self-expression.”

— John Malkovich

61. “You have to play your characters, not like them.”

— John Malkovich

62. “The theater is so disappointing, really, that it’s hard to go again and again. It’s just too heartbreaking. I’d rather watch football or play a game or read.”

— John Malkovich

63. “My father was an exceptionally strong influence on me.”

— John Malkovich

64. “I’m more boring and more conservative.”

— John Malkovich

65. “I’ve done quite a few big American films.”

— John Malkovich

66. “Anybody doing something brings something to it.”

— John Malkovich

67. “I don’t care what other people think. I don’t think it matters.”

— John Malkovich

68. “I have probably four or five male friends who have a real strong masculine side but some degree of a feminine side, too. They’re pretty rare, whereas I think women with a masculine side are much less rare.”

— John Malkovich

69. “I’m more likely to lose my temper on a film set than almost anywhere. Often the level of idiocy is so exalted that it’s impossible to comprehend.”

— John Malkovich

70. “Reviews are destructive by their very nature.”

— John Malkovich

71. “I mean, anything that money can be made off will never be a problem to make, no matter what it is.”

— John Malkovich

72. “Scary monsters are like Hula Hoops. They come in and out of fashion.”

— John Malkovich

73. “We have a tendency to think everyone’s idiotic and everyone’s only doing something idiotic, and the world is controlled by a not-so-secret group of morons. There’s great truth in that, I suppose, but then it’s also not true.”

— John Malkovich

74. “I think probably when I was little, after my brother turned on me, I just had to play by myself or with myself. I’ve always done that. I think either it’s some kind of weirdly competitive streak or it takes my mind off whatever’s bothering me.”

— John Malkovich

75. “I like to direct movies, but I don’t like to goof around for eight years talking about it.”

— John Malkovich

76. “I haven’t physically attacked anyone in a couple of years.”

— John Malkovich

77. “You can’t work in the movies. Movies are all about lighting. Very few filmmakers will concentrate on the story. You get very little rehearsal time, so anything you do onscreen is a kind of speed painting.”

— John Malkovich

78. “I like very much to do movies.”

— John Malkovich

79. “Things are so much global and Americanised.”

— John Malkovich

80. “It’s funny – people think analysis or psychiatry is mad, and THEY go to CHURCH...”

— John Malkovich

81. “Even if you do succeed most people wouldn’t notice anyway.”

— John Malkovich

82. “I never really did a western western.”

— John Malkovich

83. “I never wanted to be with someone who just hung around the house.”

— John Malkovich

84. “Theater is so ephemeral, and I love that.”

— John Malkovich

85. “My father was a very contradictory man.”

— John Malkovich

86. “I don’t wake up drenched in sweat because I haven’t been on stage in years.”

— John Malkovich

87. “I don’t want a trillion-dollar empire to run.”

— John Malkovich

88. “Unlike my grandfather or my brother, I’ve actually been able to make some money at a racetrack.”

— John Malkovich

89. “It seems whenever I’ve had a method or what I perceived to be an intellectual groundwork of some sort – a kind of game plan – it’s always been the most morbid failure.”

— John Malkovich

90. “Imagine how asleep or utterly unperceptive and clueless you would have to be not to see yourself as absurd for the most part.”

— John Malkovich

91. “When you do a really good play, the audience and the performers are looking into the same looking glass, the same microscope. And the specimen they are looking at is human life and that’s why I do it, that’s why I like it.”

— John Malkovich

92. “I’m supposed to be a pretty good theater actor.”

— John Malkovich

93. “I don’t really have a comprehension of being a public figure.”

— John Malkovich

94. “One doesn’t know if one had a happy childhood or not. I don’t really know what it means.”

— John Malkovich

95. “Well, I design costumes because I started with the theater in Chicago, but somehow a few lines just sort of fell to me to do it. And I studied it in school and I always liked it.”

— John Malkovich

96. “It never occurred to me to be an actor.”

— John Malkovich

97. “It’s a little bit hard to have personal things subject to public scrutiny, and it’s a pressure that other people aren’t under, but then they’re under a lot of pressures that we’re not under.”

— John Malkovich

98. “I don’t want to be boring. But that’s not always easy.”

— John Malkovich

99. “The projects I look for to produce or direct would not be ones in which I would want to act.”

— John Malkovich

100. “I’m very much a typical midwesterner, and I don’t think the condition is curable.”

— John Malkovich