Quotes from Clint Eastwood

I never sympathise with the accused unless there's a chance the accused is not guilty, but I certainly don't ever sympathise with the criminal.

You always want to quit while you are ahead. You don't want to be like a fighter who stays too long in the ring until you're not performing at your best.

You have to steal a lot. You have to have a criminal mentality to be a film director.

I've always been fascinated with the stealing of innocence. It's the most heinous crime, and certainly a capital crime if there ever was one.

I'm not really a Hollywood person. Not that I don't like L.A., but I'm just a Northern California guy.

When you work with kids, especially, you want to be ready to turn the camera on at a moment's notice.

In 'Changeling,' I tried to show something you'd never see nowadays - a kid sitting and looking at the radio. Just sitting in front of the radio and listening. Your mind does the rest.

I think everybody has something that they've been obsessed about in their lifetime.

Other than obvious errors like forgetting a line, often I can't see any difference between take one and take 20.

You should just evaluate the work and make your judgments accordingly. That's the way you do it in life and every other subject.

Every picture has its own demands, and every picture stimulates something within you to tell it a certain way. I don't know what that is; I don't think too much about that.

There was a stool there, and some fella kept asking me if I wanted to sit down. When I saw the stool sitting there, it gave me the idea. I'll just put the stool out there and I'll talk to Mr. Obama and ask him why he didn't keep all of the promises he made to everybody.

I love stories about women.

Society is at odds with itself.

In 'Gran Torino,' I play a guy who's racially offensive. But he learned. It shows that you're never too old to learn and embrace people that you don't understand to begin with. It seems like nobody else got that message, I guess.

As you get older, you're not afraid of doubt. Doubt isn't running the show. You take out all the self-agonizing.

I'm not really conservative. I'm conservative on certain things. I believe in less government. I believe in fiscal responsibility and all those things that maybe Republicans used to believe in but don't any more.

My old drama coach used to say, 'Don't just do something, stand there.' Gary Cooper wasn't afraid to do nothing.

My uncle played rugby, and my dad played football, and they used to argue which game was the roughest - and everybody agreed rugby was. It's a great team sport, and to be successful, every person has to play in the same level.

As I get older, I tend to put more into family than I used to.

You are always hoping that movie audiences are interested in characters and interested in story values rather than just mindless special effects. But you never know.

Pay attention to the work you want to do and everything'll work out fine. If you're in it for the ego, you might be successful but at a limited level.

The reason I still work at this stage of life is because I enjoy learning something new each day.

Let's take the work seriously, and not ourselves seriously.