Quotes from Jack Nicholson

I'm an actor who they said was wrinkled and balding and everything else when I was in my early 30's. Most of the people who wrote that who thought they were younger than me are now bald and wrinkled.

It's a slight stretch of the imagination but most people are alike in most ways so I've never had any trouble identifying with the character that I'm playing.

Staying together is a challenge. We all have to accept qualities in other people that aren't always exactly what we want or need.

I think that's what distinguishes Schmidt, really. In the movies now, so much of what is appealing to an audience is the dramatic or has to do with science fiction, and Schmidt is simply human. There's no melodrama; there's no device, It's just about a human being.

The minute that you're not learning I believe you're dead.

You only lie to two people in your life, your girlfriend and the police.

Once you've been really bad in a movie, there's a certain kind of fearlessness you develop.

Frankly, I got into the movies because I like the movies a lot.

I don't think many people have a very good understanding of leisure and the importance it plays in our lives.

Men dominate because of physicality, and thus they have mercy where women do not.

Women -- a mistake, or did He do it to us on purpose?

Everyone pretty much acknowledges that he's the man, and I still feel that underrates him.

If men are honest, everything they do and everywhere they go is for a chance to see women.

There were points in my life where I felt oddly irresistible to women. I'm not in that state now and that makes me sad.

I'm very fortunate in the sense that outside of cohabitating relationships and so forth, I've always got on just as well with women.

Women are sort of like motorcycle gangs with me. They get really shy and polite. I don't know why.

I can't hit on women in public any more. I didn't decide this; it just doesn't feel right at my age.

Because you know, down deep in my heart, when all is said and done, I still live under the illusion that basically people think of me as an up-and-coming young actor.

One of my school friends' parents owned a minigolf course, and a bunch of us kids would play there all day in the summer. Two-under deuces was a good score.

I'm the age where we didn't have television as kids. So when I saw my nieces and nephews watching Howdy Doody, Kukla, Fran and Ollie, and so forth, I thought the world had gone mad.

If you want your freedom, you have to be willing to work hard to exercise it.

I never thought in terms of typing myself, because I wasn't that successful. After an actor has done a few pieces of work, his naïveté is the part of the craft he has to nurture most.

As an actor, I want to give in to the collaboration with the director because I don't want my work to be all the same. The more this can be done with comfort, the more variety my work has had.

I have never felt brutalized as an actor. Many actors do, some times, but I've never had that experience. If I'm not happy with the balance, I just won't work with that person again.