Top 80 Sean Penn Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “If you don’t vote, you don’t matter.”

— Sean Penn

2. “When everything gets answered, it’s fake.”

— Sean Penn

3. “All I need are some tasty waves, a cool buzz, and I’m fine.”

— Sean Penn

4. “I love acting, truly my favorite people are actors.”

— Sean Penn

5. “There’s a lot of mediocrity being celebrated, and a lot of wonderful stuff being ignored or discouraged.”

— Sean Penn

6. “I like to believe that love is a reciprocal thing, that it can’t really be felt, truly, by one.”

— Sean Penn

7. “You tolerate me. You really tolerate me.”

— Sean Penn

8. “Yeah, I had actually tried to stop acting before I made Dead Man Walking.”

— Sean Penn

9. “When I buy a Nikon camera, I have no tolerance for the instructions. I’m ready to make some mistakes using it and get some bad pictures back until I’ve figured it out for myself.”

— Sean Penn

10. “I can always see light in any situation. It’s just the way I’m made.”

— Sean Penn

11. “Haiti kind of gets a hold of you.”

— Sean Penn

12. “I just want real creative freedom without worrying about, you know, car payments.”

— Sean Penn

13. “The bottom line is, you love your wife, you do your best with that.”

— Sean Penn

14. “I’m not going to have a better day, a more magical moment than the first time I heard my daughter giggle.”

— Sean Penn

15. “Beauty doesn’t ask for attention.”

— Sean Penn

16. “The advice you give to young directors for sure is to go out and become some version of a successful movie actor. Do that first and say yes to people like Terrence Malick and Clint Eastwood and Woody Allen when they come and offer you movies. It’s a great front row seat to filmmaking.”

— Sean Penn

17. “Love is a mess, at best, and I figure it can be very real in spite of all the things people try to attach to it.”

— Sean Penn

18. “If there’s anything disgusting about the movie business, it’s the whoredom of my peers.”

— Sean Penn

19. “I’m not going to recommend recklessness but somewhere just short of it – testing yourself and proactively pursuing a rite of passage has become necessary because in western developed countries we’ve become very comfort-addicted.”

— Sean Penn

20. “Marriage ain’t easy, but it’s great most of the time.”

— Sean Penn

21. “Putting something in a movie because it’s in the news doesn’t make it political to me. If you’re not going outside the same old, same old, if you’re not pushing the envelope, then you’re not doing anything. A good movie is a political thing.”

— Sean Penn

22. “I am a Justin Timberlake fan.”

— Sean Penn

23. “I don’t believe there are climate skeptics. I think there are people who indulge in a culture of what can be reduced to Fox network thinking. That has nothing to do with the politics that apply to the protection of quality of life in any sense. It’s like talking to a member of a cult.”

— Sean Penn

24. “My favorite thing to do is not act – it’s that simple.”

— Sean Penn

25. “Whatever one considers art to be, there is in many people a hunger to express themselves creatively and to feel authentic in doing that.”

— Sean Penn

26. “That was madness. You’re never going to bring one of those down with a handgun.”

— Sean Penn

27. “I think that I’ve still not been successful at playing the role of the retired actor, and I’d like to work on that.”

— Sean Penn

28. “That on a romantic level, if you feel it about somebody and it’s pure, it means that they do too.”

— Sean Penn

29. “So if we have anything original to offer, it’s to speak from our own life about the society we’re in.”

— Sean Penn

30. “When I go to bed at night and I think of humanity at large, I think of all those things.”

— Sean Penn

31. “You try to do your best at what you’re getting paid for.”

— Sean Penn

32. “I’ve been a road-rat since I got my driver’s licence at 16, so I’ve probably gone across America 20 times.”

— Sean Penn

33. “I think that it is a good time for those who voted for the ban against gay marriage to sit and reflect and anticipate their great shame and the shame in their grandchildren’s eyes if they continue that way of support. We’ve got to have equal rights for everyone.”

— Sean Penn

34. “I really love to make movies.”

— Sean Penn

35. “The one thing you can count on in Hollywood – across the board – is cowardice.”

— Sean Penn

36. “I’m a huge Woody Allen fan. Good movie, bad movie, it doesn’t matter – I just like his movies.”

— Sean Penn

37. “Whatever I was able to do with those experiences certainly contribute to whatever I’m able to do as a director. The corruption in that is that most of what I acted in the last 10 years was to steal film school time from these guys. Those were the people I thought I could learn from as a director.”

— Sean Penn

38. “There are a few directors around who I have some excitement about spending my $7 at the theatre watching their movies.”

— Sean Penn

39. “It has nothing to do with the emotional demands of a role; I’ve done comedies that are as draining to me as any drama.”

— Sean Penn

40. “There is a kind of sense of truth and reconciliation that is non-formalized, but it’s understood and accepted. Haitians are Haitians and there is an inherent loyalty that forgives an awful lot.”

— Sean Penn

41. “I think you start to prepare the minute you read something.”

— Sean Penn

42. “The major studios are by and large banks, and they give you what is by and large a loan to make a movie. Like banks, they want their money back plus.”

— Sean Penn

43. “Fulfilling what you start is why you start something.”

— Sean Penn

44. “I’ll tell you what I probably would prefer to happen less and less: actors that I know and respect in shampoo ads. Or modeling.”

— Sean Penn

45. “On any movie I’m involved with, I say what I think.”

— Sean Penn

46. “I’m not a breakfast eater.”

— Sean Penn

47. “In between, I go broke because I seem to do movies where you’re not paid a lot as an actor.”

— Sean Penn

48. “It’s a foreground of my feeling. That place moves me. And I don’t mean my country; it’s part of our shared natural world that happens to be particular to a sense of wherever my storytelling inclinations come from and my own history of kind of being a road rat and travelling.”

— Sean Penn

49. “At this stage, what would be rewarding would be for audiences to want to watch.”

— Sean Penn

50. “I think that people like the Howard Sterns, the Bill O’Reillys and to a lesser degree the bin Ladens of the world are making a horrible contribution.”

— Sean Penn