Top 50 Josh Hartnett Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Be honest with yourself and lie to everyone else.”

— Josh Hartnett

2. “I’ve had my heart broken, and it’s not fun. But I’d rather have my heart broken than break someone else’s heart.”

— Josh Hartnett

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3. “We made 16 episodes of Cracker and I loved doing the show, but unfortunately no one was watching us.”

— Josh Hartnett

4. “I admire when people take the harder path, not because they are masochistic and want to beat themselves up, but because you actually kind of learn more and I think you grow more.”

— Josh Hartnett

5. “I think that just your tastes change as you get older and I think they’ll continue to change.”

— Josh Hartnett

6. “I’m always trying to find something unique or a project that I can do something unique in.”

— Josh Hartnett

7. “Ever since Poltergeist terrified me when I was 12, I can’t watch horror films, I’m a real wuss.”

— Josh Hartnett

8. “I look for the character to be something interesting, the script to have a good story and be original, and a director that I admire.”

— Josh Hartnett

9. “Hope is the most exciting thing in life, and if you honestly believe that love is out there, it will come. And even if it doesn’t come straight away, there is still that chance all through your life that it will.”

— Josh Hartnett

10. “When you see something from afar, you develop a fantasy. But when you see it up close, 9 times out of 10, you wish you hadn’t.”

— Josh Hartnett

11. “I’m proud of ‘Black Hawk Down’ because I think it told a provocative story and it was honest. It could have had more opportunity to tell both sides of the story, but I’m still proud of it.”

— Josh Hartnett

12. “You know, I’m not really any good at working out when people are flirting with me. And I think I’m too flirtatious with people I’m trying not to flirt with! What I am good at is making people feel uncomfortable. I don’t want to but it always ends up happening!”

— Josh Hartnett

13. “You think that if you are the best actor, you deserve the most or if you are the biggest star, you deserve the most. That race just isn’t important to me.”

— Josh Hartnett

14. “I get quite fed up being on a film set day after day, six days a week. It can get to be a grind.”

— Josh Hartnett

15. “I don’t like to act in my personal life. I like to be straightforward.”

— Josh Hartnett

16. “I had a good time shooting in New Zealand. I almost bought a home there while I was there, because I loved it so much.”

— Josh Hartnett

17. “I’m looking forward to finding someone in life that I can be truly happy with and relate to on all levels – someone I can bounce my stuff off. Right now, though, I’m not searching for that. I couldn’t possibly handle it at this point. But I still like knowing it will be out there sometime later.”

— Josh Hartnett

18. “If a girl doesn’t have a sense of humor, then what would you have to talk about?”

— Josh Hartnett

19. “I’m not all that demanding, I don’t think. My family might think otherwise.”

— Josh Hartnett

20. “I have a pretty easy life.”

— Josh Hartnett

21. “I don’t really comment on my personal life because I feel like any comment at all is opening up a whole can of worms. I’d just rather not talk about who I’m dating.”

— Josh Hartnett

22. “I’m always trying to find something unique or a project that I can do something unique in. When the director has a vision for a piece that I’ve never heard before, and they can back that up with visuals and they talk a good game, I get really interested in the world that they’re trying to create.”

— Josh Hartnett

23. “If everything is going well in my life then I start to read the papers more and I start to worry about everything I can’t deal with. They say wisdom is knowing what you can fix and what you can’t change. I’m very unwise.”

— Josh Hartnett

24. “I’m a lot older than my little brothers and sister, so I think I grew up babysitting them.”

— Josh Hartnett

25. “You don’t stay the hottest guy forever unless you’re, um, Dionysus.”

— Josh Hartnett

26. “My interests are guitars, cars, and vacation. I’ve been playing guitar all my life. My dad was a professional guitarist, but I’m terrible, which lets me off the hook, so I just play for myself.”

— Josh Hartnett

27. “My friends and I make short films. We pretended to rob the Dairy Queen where our friend worked, but someone thought we were real thieves and called the cops! Soon, the cops burst in with guns drawn!”

— Josh Hartnett

28. “There are some films that really break the mold, and some films that don’t. I’ve been looking for films that break the mold a bit.”

— Josh Hartnett

29. “Life isn’t what it’s like in the movies.”

— Josh Hartnett

30. “My parents are hippies, so I must have a bit of hippie in me.”

— Josh Hartnett

31. “I became popular very young. I viewed myself as just a young actor trying to figure out how to do well, and, you know, making mistakes and learning and growing.”

— Josh Hartnett

32. “I spent my entire first pay cheque from ‘Cracker,’ a TV show on ABC, on an Audi because my other car broke down and I needed to get to work.”

— Josh Hartnett

33. “I’m quiet, and I don’t enjoy watching horror flicks, so am I like Zeke? No way.”

— Josh Hartnett

34. “You know what? I’m really attracted to British women, there’s something innately proper about them. However badly they behave their accent is so cute that it makes up for everything!”

— Josh Hartnett

35. “People care about my fame, not me. But that’s fine. I have my own life.”

— Josh Hartnett

36. “When I turned 18, I skipped my party to take my girlfriend on a road trip. It turned out to be an amazing birthday.”

— Josh Hartnett

37. “Up until the age of 16, I was very focused on sport – I played a lot of football. Then I tore my ACL and had to stop playing.”

— Josh Hartnett

38. “We’re all on a journey. The average American switches professions four times. I’m lucky to be in a business where I can change the character I am playing every couple of months.”

— Josh Hartnett

39. “I don’t think there’s a problem with being a teen idol, if that happens to me, I’ll be happy to deal with it.”

— Josh Hartnett

40. “Fame was initially this kind of blunt tool that was thrust into my hands very young.”

— Josh Hartnett

41. “I should be getting photographs of me with my arm around these people like restaurant owners do, because eventually I am going to have to prove to my kids that once I was an actor!”

— Josh Hartnett

42. “You know, honestly, acting in film is remarkably independent. You’re doing your thing and someone else is doing their thing.”

— Josh Hartnett

43. “I want to experiment; I want to keep growing. I didn’t want to just sit back and rest on my haunches and do the things I knew I could do for a while.”

— Josh Hartnett

44. “We all want somebody to come in and save the day and change our lives for the better.”

— Josh Hartnett

45. “It’s not scary to make a horror film because you get to pull back the curtain and see that none of it’s real. When you’re watching one, the terror bombards you.”

— Josh Hartnett

46. “I guess I will probably produce a little bit more. For me it’s a career, you create as you go along and you can’t worry about always being on top.”

— Josh Hartnett

47. “Running around when I was a kid was a really happy time; a time when getting home for dinner or for sleep were my only responsibilities.”

— Josh Hartnett

48. “I’m not limited by genre and it doesn’t really matter what the genre is as long as the film is going to be new and have some real artistic integrity.”

— Josh Hartnett

49. “I do a lot of weird movies that maybe you don’t like and I experiment a lot but maybe I do appreciate the process and I think my greatest joy in this business is that I have had the ability to screw up in a lot of really interesting films!”

— Josh Hartnett

50. “I think vampires have gotten maybe a little bit silly in the last years where they’re all wearing crushed velvet and reading poetry and making sweet love to their victims, you know, it’s not really all that scary.”

— Josh Hartnett

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