Top 120 John Malkovich Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I still have a temper, I suppose.”

— John Malkovich

52. “You can’t take a play someone has directed and do whatever you want with it.”

— John Malkovich

53. “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

54. “In New York in the Forties or Fifties, everybody’s in a suit, an overcoat and a hat.”

— John Malkovich

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

— John Malkovich

56. “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

57. “I’m not a control maniac.”

— John Malkovich

58. “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

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. “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

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

— John Malkovich

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

— John Malkovich

63. “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

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

— John Malkovich

65. “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

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

— John Malkovich

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

— John Malkovich

68. “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

69. “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

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

— John Malkovich

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

— John Malkovich

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

— John Malkovich

73. “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

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

— John Malkovich

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

— John Malkovich

76. “I like very much to do movies.”

— John Malkovich

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

— John Malkovich

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

— John Malkovich

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

— John Malkovich

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

— John Malkovich

81. “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

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

— John Malkovich

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

— John Malkovich

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

— John Malkovich

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

— John Malkovich

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

— John Malkovich

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

— John Malkovich

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

— John Malkovich

89. “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

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

— John Malkovich

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

— John Malkovich

92. “The most evocative thing to me is probably when a writer and a group of performers can collectively put together something compelling that asks the really simple question: ‘How do we live?’”

— John Malkovich

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

— John Malkovich

94. “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

95. “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

96. “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

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

— John Malkovich

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

— John Malkovich

99. “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

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

— John Malkovich