Top 120 Kevin Costner Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “When a defining moment comes along, you define the moment, or the moment defines you.”

— Kevin Costner

2. “I believe in long, slow, deep, soft, wet kisses that last three days.”

— Kevin Costner

3. “I have seen soldiers panic at the first sight of battle, and a squire pulling arrows from his body to fight and save his dying horse. Nobility is not a birthright, but is defined by one’s actions.”

— Kevin Costner

4. “You can be as you choose to be. It’s an act of discipline sometimes, but it can be done.”

— Kevin Costner

5. “We stand our best chance of leaving a legacy to those who want to learn, our children, by standing firm. In matters of style, hey, swing with the stream. But in matters of principle, you need to stand like a rock.”

— Kevin Costner

6. “I don’t give up. I’m a plodder. People come and go, but I stay the course.”

— Kevin Costner

7. “I haven’t lived a perfect life. I have regrets. But that’s from a lifetime of taking chances, making decisions, and trying not to be frozen. The only thing that I can do with my regrets is understand them.”

— Kevin Costner

8. “You have to decide if you’re going to wilt like a daisy or if you’re just going to go forward and live the life that you’ve been granted.”

— Kevin Costner

9. “I’m glad movies aren’t going to please everybody, they can’t. But what they have to be is recognisable. I don’t equate myself with a master painter, but I think you can recognise my films.”

— Kevin Costner

10. “Field of Dreams is probably our generation’s It’s A Wonderful Life.”

— Kevin Costner

11. “Life’s better when it’s fun. Boy, that’s deep, isn’t it?”

— Kevin Costner

Featured in: Fun Quotes

12. “I like four-hour movies.”

— Kevin Costner

13. “If you’re going to tear down a hero, you should never forget that you’re tearing down someone else’s hero. You’re tearing down somebody else’s son. You might have to face her one day.”

— Kevin Costner

14. “We all have to have our north star that we fix on and go to, but life is so much about the things that bump into you.”

— Kevin Costner

15. “When I played Robin Hood, I knew the great role was Alan Rickman’s and it didn’t bother me. I always think that leading actors should be called the best supporting actors.”

— Kevin Costner

16. “I dream of big things. I work for the small things. If you’re going to dream, you might as well dream big. A lot of that came from my mother. She was adamant about the work ethic – about how you can’t just dream things.”

— Kevin Costner

17. “It sounds vain, but I could probably make a difference for almost everyone I ever met if I chose to involve myself with them either professionally or personally.”

— Kevin Costner

18. “I’m a big fan of dreams. Unfortunately, dreams are our first casualty in life – people seem to give them up, quicker than anything, for a ‘reality.’”

— Kevin Costner

19. “I’ve always felt that failure was a completely underrated experience.”

— Kevin Costner

20. “We all have that burning question about what happens if we lose somebody we love, especially if we lose them tragically. We wonder what fear was going on, we wonder if we could have reached out and touched them, held their hand, looked in their eyes, been there.”

— Kevin Costner

21. “True movies will never be measured by how much they make – they’ll be measured by how they make you feel.”

— Kevin Costner

22. “If it’s going to be wrecked, I want to make sure I wreck it.”

— Kevin Costner

23. “You have to pick the stories that you want to be involved with and the end game is you’d like to be a part of a hit. But I think your moral obligation is to follow your own heart.”

— Kevin Costner

24. “I’m proud of all the movies I’ve made. They’re not sequels, they’re not franchises. And the reason I pick my films carefully is that I don’t want to spit on my life. I like to think of myself as more than that.”

— Kevin Costner

25. “You just do the things that you love and see if other people can like them too.”

— Kevin Costner

26. “In America, politicians do whatever to get re-elected, and a lot of decisions that were being made at that time by Kennedy were certain not to get him re-elected.”

— Kevin Costner

27. “We really don’t rest if we think our kids are drifting, or if we think they don’t have the right work ethic. It drives us crazy. Because we ultimately want them to succeed and, until they do, we feel in some way that something is not complete.”

— Kevin Costner

28. “There are a lot of things that come to bear on movies now that I don’t think are good for movies. They’re trying to appeal to the biggest demographic and, when they do that, you sometimes flatten out.”

— Kevin Costner

29. “I’ve had some movies that have been ridiculed, but that’s OK with me. I don’t feel that really defines me. Should I change who I am to be popular?”

— Kevin Costner

30. “I think religion is a funny thing because, when you see somebody who can really break it down, sometimes it feels foolish what you believe.”

— Kevin Costner

31. “Real heroes are men who fall and fail and are flawed, but win out in the end because they’ve stayed true to their ideals and beliefs and commitments.”

— Kevin Costner

32. “It’s nice to be wanted in almost any capacity.”

— Kevin Costner

33. “If you’re willing to tell somebody that you love them, are you also willing to say you’re sorry? You need to, even when you think you’re in the right.”

— Kevin Costner

34. “I stand up for what I believe. I don’t know if it’s always paid off for me, because I’ve been ridiculed and humiliated.”

— Kevin Costner

35. “It’s nice to be wanted. That’s a really good feeling. I’m not immune to it.”

— Kevin Costner

36. “Broken people say awful things and do incredibly absurd things.”

— Kevin Costner

37. “I’m a coach’s coaching player. I like to be on the floor. So, if the coach tells me what to do out on the floor, I can get it done. I’m really comfortable being directed.”

— Kevin Costner

38. “Being a celebrity is probably the closest to being a beautiful woman as you can get.”

— Kevin Costner

39. “When you try to portray people’s lives, you try to make sure you don’t portray them as clowns and that you give them a level of dignity. You don’t try to change their persona, but you try to understand that they had unique problems, set in a century that you don’t live.”

— Kevin Costner

40. “You can spend your life trying to be popular, and that’s a tricky business. You can just try to be true to yourself.”

— Kevin Costner

41. “Sometimes it takes a partner to say, “What is it you want?” because I think we operate in life and sometimes we don’t know. We’re all in some kind of maze going after the cheese at the end, and we get it and we go, “What is it that we want?””

— Kevin Costner

42. “I’m a pretty convenient foil for a lot of people.”

— Kevin Costner

43. “There’s nothing more noble than a father and mother making an opportunity for their child, knowing that their life is gonna be hard. There’s something incredibly heroic about that.”

— Kevin Costner

44. “Money isn’t a major motivating force in my life. Nor is my profession. There are other things that I care more about than being an actor.”

— Kevin Costner

45. “I think one of the first things to go as people’s lives start to go down is their dreams. Dreams should be the last thing to go – dreams are the things you go down with. If you’re left clinging to a piece of driftwood in the middle of the ocean, I’d put on it the word dreams.”

— Kevin Costner

46. “It’s never bothered me to work hard. I’ve probably worked on some of the longest schedules in movie history.”

— Kevin Costner

47. “President Kennedy was willing to go to war. He was not a coward. The man had been in war and so had Ken O’Donnell. He was ready to protect this nation, but he was not ready for a military solution just because it was being rammed down his throat.”

— Kevin Costner

48. “I don’t feel the need to direct. I tried to get other people to direct Dances, but they wouldn’t do it. They all thought it was too long. One director wanted to cut the Civil War sequence. Another thought the white woman was very cliched.”

— Kevin Costner

49. “I feel like I’ve been able to live a dream life, but my view of things is absolutely inside behavior about how I behave and how I count on other people behaving.”

— Kevin Costner

50. “I’m a ‘what if’ person. I have always felt that failure was a completely underrated experience. I have taken blows. I have had high moments. But I don’t think the blows have ever hardened me. My enthusiasms are still big.”

— Kevin Costner