Top 60 Mickey Rourke Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Comeback is a good word, man.”

— Mickey Rourke

2. “Women are much stronger than men. When a woman says enough is enough, which means enough is enough. Man will always lie at her feet in the hope of return. I was lying. And somehow happy.”

— Mickey Rourke

3. “I had a lot of anger inside me and that came out at times that were not particularly advantageous to me career-wise.”

— Mickey Rourke

4. “Sometimes, when a man is alone, that’s all you got is your dog.”

— Mickey Rourke

5. “I started to shortcircuit because I had high aspirations for the film. I never told anybody that.”

— Mickey Rourke

6. “My dogs are more important than my family.”

— Mickey Rourke

7. “I did think for many, many years that because of my ability I could beat the system. And I was wrong.”

— Mickey Rourke

8. “Bounty hunters these days – because everything is so sophisticated with computers and surveillance, it doesn’t have to be a one-man-army-type guy who goes in and kicks a door down.”

— Mickey Rourke

9. “I thought my talent would transcend my outspokenness. I was wrong.”

— Mickey Rourke

10. “Being out of work for 13 to 15 years is no walk in the park.”

— Mickey Rourke

11. “I never knew my father, and I’d hate to repeat that kind of cycle with my own children, because I’d also want to be there for them no matter what.”

— Mickey Rourke

12. “Hey, baby, nobody suffers like the poor.”

— Mickey Rourke

13. “Some of your worst gangsters are guys who were very low-key.”

— Mickey Rourke

14. “All I am hoping for is to be able to work-I think my best work is still ahead of me-I think all that I have been through in the last several years have only made me a better, more interesting actor.”

— Mickey Rourke

15. “I was very ashamed of seeing a therapist because I thought only crazy people went, and then, after about nine years, I asked him, ‘Well, was I really crazy?’ And he nodded and said, ‘You were but not any more.’”

— Mickey Rourke

16. “People are always afraid of the truth.”

— Mickey Rourke

17. “A lot of those who let you down are those who seemed the closest to you.”

— Mickey Rourke

18. “If you look closely at some scenes in Diner, my eyes look like Dracula’s.”

— Mickey Rourke

19. “It’s always been the case that you have the really rich, and the really poor. But hey, look, all the great empires have their periods where they rule the world, and then they crumble.”

— Mickey Rourke

20. “Actors should shut up about politics. They tend to be ill-informed finger-pointers who just cosy up to some flavour of-the-month liberal.”

— Mickey Rourke

21. “I have so many boxing gloves around my house that I would get them confused with other gloves.”

— Mickey Rourke

22. “I had gotten injured during the boxing, and I was supposed to take several months off because I’d had a couple of concussions, and so I sort of just left the boxing and got into the acting by accident.”

— Mickey Rourke

23. “I’m the worst surfer in California. My balance is off from boxing.”

— Mickey Rourke

24. “I probably did a dozen plays, like Off-Off-Broadway stuff.”

— Mickey Rourke

25. “I’ve been with a lot of women, but who’s counting? It’s nothing I’m proud of. It’s a physical need. Sometimes afterwards I just want to blow my brains out, it’s so meaningless.”

— Mickey Rourke

26. “Where I come from, being a hard man is being able to take a good beating and then get back up again and carry on fighting.”

— Mickey Rourke

27. “I behaved worse than anybody for 15 years, and you have to pay the price for that. I used to blame other people, then therapy made me realise I had to change.”

— Mickey Rourke

28. “Since I knew wrestling was all choreographed, I thought, Oh, they don’t get hurt at all. But I walked away with a renewed respect for the sport. Because I was very ignorant before – I knew nothing about it.”

— Mickey Rourke

29. “I come from a violent background. So I became hard. I realised that I had made myself that way to deal with a feeling of abandonment and shame.”

— Mickey Rourke

30. “A reputation is really hard to live down.”

— Mickey Rourke

31. “I was very immature when I was young, and for me there was no balance. Everything was just all or nothing.”

— Mickey Rourke

32. “I don’t mind getting punched in the nose by a guy standing in front of me. It’s getting stabbed in the back that I can’t handle.”

— Mickey Rourke

33. “Evan Rachel Wood is the best actress I’ve ever worked with, hands down.”

— Mickey Rourke

34. “I don’t care what Tom Cruise says about therapy.”

— Mickey Rourke

35. “I grew up in a gym in Miami, the one where Muhammad Ali trained. I had 142 amateur fights and lost three.”

— Mickey Rourke

36. “I spent a lot of years trying to beat the system and, in the end, the system kicked my behind good.”

— Mickey Rourke

37. “I still work out most days. When I do it, I go full blast five or six days a week, two to three hours a day. I enjoy it. It’s therapeutic for me.”

— Mickey Rourke

38. “It’s the formulaic studio movies the make money, and when they do, the actors in them are automatically movie stars.”

— Mickey Rourke

39. “Years ago I realized that maybe I made mistake, politically, when I turned a lot of that stuff down. I would go off to obscure places and make movies that six people went to see.”

— Mickey Rourke

40. “All that prosthetic makeup drains you. By the time it’s lunch, you’re done.”

— Mickey Rourke

41. “Acting was never my first choice as a profession, but I came to terms with it when I decided I better buckle down and be the best I can be at it.”

— Mickey Rourke

42. “I had some things I had to fix. It took me 14 years to do it. But it was never really fun back in the day to work with directors who were a lot older and were like authoritarian and talking to you like that.”

— Mickey Rourke

43. “I trained like an animal, but the thing is focus and concentration. When the bell rings it’s like when the little red light goes on over the camera. And I can usually nail my lines on the first or second take because I’m right there.”

— Mickey Rourke

44. “I think the first year and a half that I was in New York I was having trouble just living somewhere. Back in them days the city was a lot different than it is now.”

— Mickey Rourke

45. “It was either therapy or die.”

— Mickey Rourke

46. “A lot of the stuff I am now seeing is edgy, raw kinda material.”

— Mickey Rourke

47. “Wrestling and boxing is like Ping-Pong and rugby. There’s no connection.”

— Mickey Rourke

48. “In order to understand the stock market we have to realize that, like anything enormous and inert, it’s fundamentally stable, and, like anything emotion-driven, it’s volatile as hell. Got that? Me neither.”

— Mickey Rourke

49. “I had a bonding problem when I went off and boxed for five years. I was over in Europe and Asia fighting because I wanted to do something different; I was tired of acting. But the thing is, when I was done doing that, I couldn’t get a job.”

— Mickey Rourke

50. “I spent so long studying really hard to become a fine actor, but threw it all away because I got the adulation and the fame so easily.”

— Mickey Rourke