John Malkovich Quotations | Page 2

I prefer to conduct my life based on how I treat people.

I don't mind tracksuits. At the track.

I don't mind what I play, really.

I don't need to be liked.

I don't really go through a process, it goes through me.

My father could be very distancing. My clearest memory is of him squatting, watering plants for hours and hours at a time, completely silent. He was very self-contained; my mother was more outgoing and chatty and social. I'm certainly more like her.

Politics is not really my thing.

I find it hard to pre-plan every element of everything I do. It's not my thing.

I go around the world, working with all kinds of people who I love.

I think probably when I was little, after my brother turned on me, I just had to play by myself or with myself. I've always done that. I think either it's some kind of weirdly competitive streak or it takes my mind off whatever's bothering me.

I like to direct movies, but I don't like to goof around for eight years talking about it.

I like very much to do movies.

I mean, anything that money can be made off will never be a problem to make, no matter what it is.

I was never a fanatical movie person. There are many popular films I absolutely love like anyone else. Having said that, I don't have time to go to the movies very much. I work a lot of different things, I'm always busy. But I'm always happy to see a popular movie.

I don't throw things or yell.

I mean, a lot of time rehearsals are taken up with other things other than preparing a character.

Art is not disposable. If you want it, you have to hold it and smell it and touch it and read the credits and enjoy it and put it on your wall.

I always wanted to be fashionable.

I don't want to be boring. But that's not always easy.

Most of the women that I like have a haunted quality - they're sort of like women who live in a haunted house by themselves.

Unlike my grandfather or my brother, I've actually been able to make some money at a racetrack.

A dog that has rabies probably will do things it wouldn't do if it didn't have rabies. But that doesn't change the fact that it has rabies.

I don't want a trillion-dollar empire to run.

My father was a very contradictory man.

Of course it's trivial, but then most things are.

Along with the good qualities, if someone isn't vulnerable I can't be around them to a certain extent. And I don't mean vulnerable to me or vulnerable to me in a sexual way. I just mean vulnerable, period.

I wouldn't describe myself as lacking in confidence, but I would just say that - the ghosts you chase you never catch.

Imagine how asleep or utterly unperceptive and clueless you would have to be not to see yourself as absurd for the most part.

I have probably four or five male friends who have a real strong masculine side but some degree of a feminine side, too. They're pretty rare, whereas I think women with a masculine side are much less rare.

I think 1973 was the nadir of fashion. When you watch the coverage from that era, you're struck by the astonishing ugliness of the clothes.

When you think of how history is revealed, we know certain things to be facts at certain periods of time, which turn out not to be so factual as time marches on.

Well, I design costumes because I started with the theater in Chicago, but somehow a few lines just sort of fell to me to do it. And I studied it in school and I always liked it.

I know I have a fairly strong feminine side. I find myself really distanced from male behavior.

We have a tendency to think everyone's idiotic and everyone's only doing something idiotic, and the world is controlled by a not-so-secret group of morons. There's great truth in that, I suppose, but then it's also not true.

The most evocative thing to me is probably when a writer and a group of performers can collectively put together something compelling that asks the really simple question: 'How do we live?'

Sigmund Freud said we act out our own dreams, but if you are only an actor you are not acting out your own dream. You are simply participating in someone else's dream.

I don't have a great intellect, and I can't compete with people who do. I feel certain things. And all I know, and all I can do, is what I feel.

It's tough to figure out how do we compete in Europe and North America, when obviously a living wage for us is very different than a living wage in Indonesia.

Actors generally get to do things you probably shouldn't do in real life - well, at least as much as one might like to or be tempted to. Though I suppose a lot of actors just go ahead and do it, don't they?

You can't take a play someone has directed and do whatever you want with it.

It seems whenever I've had a method or what I perceived to be an intellectual groundwork of some sort - a kind of game plan - it's always been the most morbid failure.

When you do a really good play, the audience and the performers are looking into the same looking glass, the same microscope. And the specimen they are looking at is human life and that's why I do it, that's why I like it.

You have to play your characters, not like them.

I was a very good baseball and football player, but my father always told me I was much more interested in how I looked playing baseball or football than in actually playing. There's great truth in that.

The world is ruled by violence, or at least the imminent threat of violence. It always has been.

Quite often - a lot of the work I had done had been extensively with women. Most especially in the theater, but also quite often in the movies. That has its own delights, and maybe pitfalls too.

For a while I wanted to be a professional baseball pitcher, and then I wanted to be a musician and then sometimes I think I'd like to start a store for gift-wrapping Christmas presents...But I feel I could do most things I set my mind to, except mechanical things, I'm not very good at that.

You can't work in the movies. Movies are all about lighting. Very few filmmakers will concentrate on the story. You get very little rehearsal time, so anything you do onscreen is a kind of speed painting.

There's no worse feeling in the world than realizing the play you've directed doesn't work.

I don't wake up drenched in sweat because I haven't been on stage in years.

With acting it's your neck up there in the end. And if you think the director can't help you it's one thing. But if you feel they're reining you in when they need to be giving you some rope, or vice versa, then I just don't tolerate that.

I'm not a control maniac.

I don't have a saviour or a royal family.

When I have failed as an actor I've always thought it was my fault. But when I direct something, I wouldn't want the actors to think it was their fault.

I'm more boring and more conservative.

I don't really have a comprehension of being a public figure.

I never wanted to be with someone who just hung around the house.

I was never a fanatical movie person.

And may the best of you - for it will only be the best of you, and even then only in the rarest and briefest moments - succeed in framing that most basic of questions, 'how do we live?'

I probably have more female friends than any man I've ever met. What I like about them is that almost always they're generally mentally tougher, and they're better listeners, and they're more capable of surviving things. And most of the women that I like have a haunted quality - they're sort of like women who live in a haunted house all by themselves.