SEAN PENN

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.

In school, I was a genius of the year preceding the year I was in, every year.

I cannot tell you that I ever fell in love with the theater as an audience. I fell in love with the theater as an actor for a period of time, but I have struggled as an audience, and I struggle more now than then. I was always a movie guy.

I'm a huge Woody Allen fan. Good movie, bad movie, it doesn't matter - I just like his movies.

There's a lot of mediocrity being celebrated, and a lot of wonderful stuff being ignored or discouraged.

I think life's an irrational obsession.

I love stories about people who are smart enough to know that what they're doing is destroying them, but that knowing that doesn't help them.

On any movie I'm involved with, I say what I think.

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

Well, look at all of these summer blockbusters. You can't help but laugh a little, because you've already seen a lot of these movies 482 times.

When you act in a film, you're inevitably surrounded by people you didn't choose, right down to the set painter. I like being able to pick the family I'm waking up to in the morning that's going to make this group effort to tell a story that applies to what's interesting to me at that stage in my life.

There is no re-inventing the wheel.

You're always having to live more to fuel something new. It's an obligation to yourself and to the audience. The personal baggage that comes with being a known actor just adds to that struggle.

I love acting, truly my favorite people are actors.

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.

'The Indian Runner' was easy. It had been incubating in me for eight years, and by the time I sat down to write the thing, I had all the pictures in my head.

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

Marriage ain't easy, but it's great most of the time.

Well, I think that when you direct a movie or write it. And in the case of the two movies I did, I wrote and directed, they occupy a special place for you.

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

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

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.

I'm not a breakfast eater.

If you're willing to put two thoughts into a picture then you're already ahead of the game.

I had a house burn down once, and everything in life burned, except my family, and it was so liberating. I didn't have a bad moment about it. It sort of reinvigorated my interest in a lot of things.