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Sean Penn on acting 

I appreciate words, and I appreciate acting, so combining those elements into a film is the ultimate act of appreciation.

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.

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

My favorite thing to do is not act - it's that simple. 

But I'm never again going to do a movie as an actor where I'm enjoying myself. It's not fun, and it doesn't have to be. 

There've been a couple of times when I've gotten the offer to do the odd one that'll make the bank big forever. 

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

If the primary statement of the film is that if you have good abs it's OK to kill people, I pass.

I've always operated under the notion that audiences don't always know when they're being lied to, but that they always know when they're being told the truth. And if there are what I think are unsung truths to be talked about in a film -- through a character, through a story -- and that dominates the piece, that's the key for me. I think the biggest thing is to not participate in the damaging, lying cinema.

Sean Penn on directing

I think, you know, if the right project kind of came along that I would be able to direct, I would love to do that.  

Directing is the ultimate job of an appreciator.  

Directors like Alejandro come along very rarely, and you're very lucky if you stumble across one in your life as an actor.  

I think it's much more important to direct movies but if it's going to take five years between each one then I'll have to make up for that.  

I think that you become a bit enlightened to the concerns of the filmmaking process more when you direct.  

If I win the lottery, I'm gonna direct three to four pictures every four to five years, instead of one - and there won't be time to act.

If there's anything disgusting in the movie business, it is the whoredom of my peers.

So, if you're an artist who is in it just for the money, I would be against you.

I hate journalists. Or better. I hate paparazzi. Yeah, I punched them out and I'll do it again if it's necessary. I think a fist in their face is the only way to protect my private life. I demand my freedom. And I must have it.

We have some good people in politics - it's just that they don't win. In the same way we have some good movies, but they don't succeed in the US.

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 on love and family

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

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.

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

Marriage ain't easy, but it's great most of the time.
 
My daughter is changing so rapidly now that her likes are different every day, and I love being involved with that.  

Family makes me feel there's a reason I'm alive... I'm feeling my life, which I didn't always do partly because I'd be drunk a lot.    

Sean Penn on Iraq and politics I wanted to come to Iraq and see Iraqi faces - children, adults, diplomats, anybody that implies - and go home with some impressions that will not let me off the hook. . . . It's not abstract anymore.   Sacrificing American soldiers or innocent civilians in an unprecedented preemptive attack on a separate sovereign nation may well prove itself a most temporary medicine. Simply put, if there is a war or continued sanctions against Iraq, the blood of Americans and Iraqis alike will be on our hands. My trip here is to personally record the human face of the Iraqi people so that their blood - along with that of American soldiers - would not be invisible on my own hands. I think it's really important to be able to feel your own life, and I had felt so numbed by what had been a kind of surreal saturation of what was going on in the Middle East, and what it was going to mean, particularly relative to my kids' future and things like that. There's the death penalty as society deals with it and legislates it, and I'm against it. 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 [to society]. I'd like to trade O'Reilly for bin Laden. [O'Reilly] is a grumpy, self-loathing joke. I am more patriotic than this president we have, who I consider a traitor of human and American principles. I was brought up in a country that relished fear-based religion, corrupt government, and an entire white population living on stolen property that they murdered for and that is passed on from generation to generation. I don't consider myself specifically political, you know? I think of working as an actor as being a human thing. The concerns I have that fall into politics are human concerns.

Sean Penn on Sean Penn 

Oh, I'm a big-mouth. I said a lot of things.

I'm not a breakfast eater.

I've never really been one to get what they call stage fright so much.

You try to do your best at what you're getting paid for.

If too many people like you, you're doing something wrong.