Quotes

Clint Eastwood has been in lot of interviews like all other celebrities. Here below you can find some of his famous quotes, and they should give you an insight in his personality. – Enjoy and have fun!

“A good joke is a good joke whenever. But my kids make me laugh now.”
“A good man always knows his limitations”
“And I like to direct the same way that I like to be directed.”"Plastic surgery used to be a thing where older people would try to go into this dream world of being 28 years old again. But now, in Hollywood, even people at 28 are having work done. Society has made us believe you should look like an 18-year-old model. “
“As for me, I like being behind the camera instead of in front of it. I can wear what I want. Will I act again? I never say never. I like doing things where I can stretch and go in different directions. I`m not looking to take it easy. Like the Marines… “
“As Jerry Fielding used to say, “We’ve come this far, let’s not ruin it by thinking.”
“As you get older, you like kids a lot more.”
“As you get older, you’re not afraid of doubt. Doubt isn’t running the show. You take out all the self-agonizing.”
“At the studios, everybody`s into sequels or remakes or adaptations of old TV shows. I don`t know if it`s because of the corporate environment or they`re just out of ideas. Pretty soon, they`re going to be wanting to do one of “Rawhide” (1959). “
“Barack Obama was unimaginable back when I was a kid. Count Basie and a lot of big bands would come through Seattle when I was young. They could play at a club, but they couldn’t frequent the place.”
“Cassius from bondage will deliver Cassius.”
“Children teach you that you can still be humbled by life, that you learn something new all the time. That’s the secret to life, really — never stop learning. It’s the secret to career. I’m still working because I learn something new all the time. It’s the secret to relationships. Never think you’ve got it all.”
“During last week’s AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am there was as much talk about who didn’t show up as who did. Favorite son Bill Murray was in Italy filming a movie, while Tiger Woods had cited the tournaments bumpy … We have great players here this week, so we’re not going to worry about one or two guys having a bug up their ass.”
“Even in grammar school they taught you to go with your first impression. It’s like multiple-choice questions. If you go back and start dwelling, you’ll talk yourself out of it and make the wrong pick. That’s just a theory. I’ve never seen any studies on it. But I believe it.”
“Every movie I make teaches me something, and that`s why I keep making them. I`m at that stage of life when I could probably stop and just hit golf balls. But in filming these two movies about Iwo Jima, I learnt about war and about character. I also learnt… “
“Go ahead, make my day”
“God this stuff isn’t getting to me – the shootings, the knifings, and the beatings. Old ladies being bashed in the head for their social security checks. Nah that doesn’t bother me. But you know what does bother me? You know what makes me really sick to my stomach? It’s watching you stuff your face with those hotdogs! Nobody – I mean nobody puts ketchup on a hot dog!”
“Guys I thought of as heroes were like Joe Louis and, maybe during the war, there was General George S. Patton, of course, and maybe Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was the head of the Allied forces, and Gary Cooper. There were just a handful of men and a ha… “
“Harry Callahan: I know what you’re thinking. Did he fire six shots or only five? Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement, I’ve kind of lost track myself. But being as this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you’ve got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya punk?”
“He played the tour because he loved the game, but he loved to play percentage golf,” Miller said. ”
“Her secret didn’t surprise Eastwood one bit. He says her plain-and-simple determination to play the part is in large part why the film turned out so well. This is just another step in her path to greatness, … She’s the best there is, as good an actress as I’ve worked with.”
“Hollywood, as everyone knows, glamorizes physical courage. . . . If I had to define courage myself, I wouldn’t say it’s about shooting people. I’d say it’s the quality that stimulates people that enables them to move ahead and look beyond themselves.”
“I don`t like the wimp syndrome. No matter how ardent a feminist may be, if she is a heterosexual female, she wants the strength of a male companion as well as the sensitivity. The gentlest people in the world are macho males, people who are confident i… “
“I don’t believe in pessimism. If something doesn’t come up the way you want, forge ahead.“If you think it’s going to rain, it will.”
“I don’t know if I can tell you exactly when the pussy generation started, maybe when people started asking about the meaning of life.”
“I feel very close to the western. There are not too many American art forms that are original. Most are derived from European art forms. Other than the western and jazz or blues, that`s all that`s really original. “
“I had an issue before the council. I remember getting up and there was a lady who sat and knitted the whole time, never looked up. “No, no, no,” she said. And I thought this can’t be. When you’re elected, you have to at least pretend like you’re interested in what people are there for. How do you have the chutzpah to just sit there, not pay? Attention, not interact at all? It needed to be corrected.”
“I have a very strict gun control policy: if there’s a gun around, I want to be in control of it.”
“I have children by other women. I got to give Dina the credit for bringing everyone together. She never had the ego thing of the second wife. The natural instinct might have been to kill off everybody else. You know the cavewoman mentality. But she brought everybody together. She’s friendly with my first wife, friendly to former girlfriends. She went out of her way to unite everybody. She’s been extremely influential in my life.”
“I have strong feelings about gun control. If there’s a gun around, I want to be controlling it.”
“I know what you’re thinking. Did he fire six shots or only five? Well to tell you the truth in all these excitements I’ve kind of… lost track myself. But being this is a .44 Magnum – the most powerful hand gun in the world and would blow your head Clean off, you’ve got to ask yourself one question–Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya punk!”
“I like the libertarian view, which is to leave everyone alone. Even as a kid, I was annoyed by people who wanted to tell everyone how to live. “
“I like working with actors who don`t have anything to prove. “
“I liked the Million Dollar Baby (2004)` script a lot. Warner Bros. said the project had been submitted to them and they`d passed on it. I said, “But I like it.” They said, “Well, it`s a boxing movie.” And I said, “It`s not a boxing movie in my opinion. It… “
“I never considered myself a cowboy, because I wasn`t. But I guess when I got into cowboy gear I looked enough like one to convince people that I was. “
“I remember buying a very old hotel in Carmel. I went into an upper attic room and saw that all the windows were painted black. “What was going on here?” I asked the prior owners. They said they thought the Japanese were off the coast during the war.”
“I remember going to a huge waterfall on a glacier in Iceland. People were there on a rock-platform overlook to see it. They had their kids. There was a place that wasn’t sealed off, but it had a cable that stopped anybody from going past a certain point. I said to myself, you know, in the States they’d have that hurricane-fenced off, because they’re afraid somebody’s going to fall and some lawyer’s going to appear. There, the mentality was like it was in America in the old days: If you fall, you’re stupid.”
“I think I`m on a track of doing pictures nobody wants to do, that they`re all afraid of. I guess it`s the era we live in, where they`re doing remakes of “The Dukes of Hazzard” (1979) and other old television shows. I must say, I`m not a negative person, b… “
“I think kids are natural actors. You watch most kids; if they don`t have a toy they`ll pick up a stick and make a toy out of it. Kids will daydream all the time. “
“I think people jumped to conclusions about Dirty Harry (1971) without giving the character much thought, trying to attach right-wing connotations to the film that were never really intended. Both the director Don Siegel and I thought it was a basic kind… “
“I tried being reasonable, I didn’t like it.”
“I was a fan of Hilary’s from ‘Boys Don’t Cry’ and I saw her in ‘Insomnia,’ where she was good, but she didn’t have a very deep part.”
“I was a teenager when the battle of Iwo Jima took place. I remember hearing about the bond drive and the need to maintain the war effort. Back then, people had just come through 10 years of a Depression, and they were used to working for everything. “
“I was kind of a little disappointed when they started building a competition between Marty (Martin Scorsese) and me. I have the greatest respect for him and all the films he’s done over the years.”
“I was tired of playing the nice, clean-cut cowboy in “Rawhide” (1959), I wanted something earthier. Something different from the old fashioned Western. You know: Hero rides in, very stalwart, with white hat, man`s beating a horse, hero jumps off, punches … “
“I`ve actually had people come up to me and ask me to autograph their guns. “
“I`ve done a lot of violent movies especially in the early days. My recent efforts, like the Bridges of Madison County (1995), weren`t too violent. In recent years I`ve done less, and, yes, I am concerned about violence in film. In `92, when I did Unforgiven”"Probably the lousiest western ever made. – On Ambush at Cimarron Pass (1958) “
“I`ve thought about retiring for years now. When I did “Play Misty for Me” in 1970, I thought that if I could pull this off maybe I could step behind the camera, and it would be time to see the end of me. Every year I have threatened to do that – and here … “
“I’d like to be a bigger and more knowledgeable person 10 years from now than I am today. I think that, for all of us, as we grow older, we must discipline ourselves to continue expanding, broadening, learning, keeping our minds active and open.”
“If I’d had good discipline, I might have gone into music.”
“If you think it’s going to rain, it will. “
“If you want a guarantee, buy a toaster. “
“I’m interested in the fact that the less secure a man is, the more likely he is to have extreme prejudice.”
“I’m not one of those guys who have been terribly active in organized religion. But I don’t disrespect it. I’d never try to impose any doubts that I might have on anyone else.”
“I’m past doing one chin-up more than I did the day before. I just kind of do what I feel like.”
“I’m suffering from oxygen deprivation. It’s overwhelming watching your career go by.”
“In America, instead of making the audience come to the film, the idea seems to be for you to go to the audience. They come up with the demographics for the film and then the film is made and sold strictly to that audience. Not to say that it`s all bad,… “
“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.”
“In school, I could hear the leaves rustle and go on a journey.”
“In this world there are two kinds of people, my friend, those with loaded guns and those who dig. You dig.”
“In those days, they`d make interview tests, not acting tests. They`d sit you in front of the camera and talk- just as we`re talking now. I thought I was an absolute clod. It looked pretty good; it was photographed well, but I thought, `If that`s acting, I… “
“It keeps coming back to “We’ve come this far, let’s not ruin it by thinking.”
“It takes tremendous discipline to control the influence, the power you have over other people’s lives.”
“It was sort of the beginning of celebrity in a way. They felt the heroes were all the people who died over there. They felt terrible about being singled out.”
“It’s making sure that the words “public servant” is not forgotten. That’s why I did it. ‘Cause I thought, I don’t need this. The fact that I didn’t need it made me think I could do more. It’s the people who need it that I’m suspect of.”
“I’ve got a good crew that is very familiar with me. I don’t have to say a lot to them. We just set up the shot, and I depend on everybody to do their parts. I just say, “Okay….”
“I’ve never met a genius. A genius to me is someone who does well at something he hates. Anybody can do well at something he loves – it’s just a question of finding the subject.”
“Kids piercing themselves piercing their tongues what kind of masochism is that? Is it to show you can just take it?”
“Listen punk. To me you’re nothing’ but dog shit, you understand? And a lot of things can happen to dog shit. It can be scraped up with a shovel off the ground. It can dry up and blow away in the wind. Or it can be stepped on and squashed. So take my advice and be careful where the dog shits ya!”
“Macho was a fashionable word in the 1980s. Everybody was kind of into it, what`s macho and what isn`t macho. I really don`t know what macho is. I never have understood. Does it mean somebody who swaggers around exuding testosterone? And kicks the gate open. “
“Maybe I`m getting to the age when I`m starting to be senile or nostalgic or both, but people are so angry now. You used to be able to disagree with people and still be friends. Now you hear these talk shows and everyone who believes differently from you … “
“Men must know their limitations.”
“Million Dollar Baby won the Academy Award. That was nice, that was great. But you don’t dwell on it. An awful lot of good pictures haven’t won Academy Awards, so it doesn’t have much bearing. Letters from Iwo Jima was nominated for an Academy Award. We didn’t win it, but that picture was still as good as I could do it. Did it deserve it less than some other picture? No, not really. But there are other aspects that come into it. In the end, you’ve just got to be happy with what you’ve done. There you are.”
“My father died very suddenly at sixty-three, just dropped dead. For a long time afterward, I’d ask myself, why didn’t I ask him to play golf more? Why didn’t I spend more time with him? But when you’re off trying to get the brass ring, you forget and overlook those little things. It gives you a certain amount of regret later on, but there’s nothing you can do about it. So you just forge on.”
“My father had a couple of kids at the beginning of the Depression. There was not much employment. Not much welfare. People barely got by. People were tougher then.”
“My father used to say to me, “Show them what you can do, and don`t worry about what you`re going to get. Say you`ll work for free and make yourself invaluable. “
“my old drama coach used to say, “Don`t just does something, stand there.” Gary Cooper wasn`t afraid to do nothing. “
“My old drama coach used to say, ‘Don’t just do something, stand there.’ Gary Cooper wasn’t afraid to do nothing.”
“No, I don’t have to practice that grunt. You just do it. Once you’re in character, you’re in character. You don’t sit there purposely thinking, Well, I’ll grunt here, or I’ll groan there.”
“Nothing wrong with shooting as long as the right people get shot.”
“Nowadays you`d have many battles before you blow it up, but eventually you`d takes it down. And that`s okay, I don`t heavily quarrel with that, but for me personally, having made films for years and directed for 33 years, it just seems to me that I long fo… “
“On his mother so at 96 I’m thanking her for her genes.”
“On John Huston It`s another aspect of the character that pleased me: he was interested in other things besides his art. He liked women, gambling, living the high life. He could have a life parallel to his work. I could identify with this type of behavior… “
“On John Wayne I gave him a piece of material that I thought had potential for us to do as a younger guy and an older guy. He wrote me back critical of it. He had seen High Plains Drifter (1973), and he didn`t think that represented Americana like She Wo… “
“On President George W. Bush you`ve got to admire somebody who stands up for what they believe regardless of how the polls go. A lot of presidents do everything by the polls. They do a focus group then all of a sudden they say, “OK, that`s what I`m going… “
“On the Iraq war I wasn`t for going in there. Only because democracy isn`t something that you get overnight. I don`t think America got democracy overnight. It`s something we had to fight for and believe in. “
“On the Iraq war My druthers would have been, “Get a more benevolent dictator and stick him in. You know, try somebody a little less mean.” You don`t go in there and fire the army. The army`s got to do something. When you fire them, you leave them all une… “
“One of the first films I went to – I went with my dad because my mother didn`t want to go see a war movie – was Sergeant York (1941). My dad was a big admirer of Sergeant York stories from World War I. It was directed by Howard Hawks. That was when I fi… “
“Opinions are like assholes, everybody has one.”
“People love westerns worldwide. There’s something fantasy like about an individual fighting the elements. Or even bad guys and the elements. It’s a simpler time. There’s no organized laws and stuff. The last one I did was in ‘92. Unforgiven. That was a wonderful script. But it seemed like it was the end of the road for me with the genre, because it sort of summarized everything I felt about the western at that particular time.”
“Politicians have to make unpopular decisions. Schwarzenegger is going to understand the nature of his job. I wish him good luck; he’s going to need it. It’s going to be difficult for him.”
“Respect your efforts, respect yourself. Self-respect leads to self-discipline, when you have both firmly under your belt that’s real power.”
“Smaller details are less important. Let’s get on with the important stuff.”
“Sometimes if you want to see a change for the better, you have to take things into your own hands.”
“Ten Million Dollar Baby.”
“I know what you’re thinking, punk. He just threw three straight split-fingered fastballs at the knees. Does he have any left? Well, to tell you the truth in all the excitement, I kind of lost track myself…”
“That’s why I don’t rehearse a lot and why I shoot a lot immediately. I have ideas of where I’d like to take the character, but we both end up going together.”
“The band guys were looked down upon when I was a kid. I remember playing the flugelhorn and everybody said, what then…?”
“The clock’s ticking, Pops, and I’m only getting older.”
“The innocence of childhood is like the innocence of a lot of animals.”
“The Korean War was only a few years after World War II. We all went. But you couldn’t help but think, Shit. What the hell? What have we gained? One minute you’re unleashing the tremendous power of nuclear fission, and then a few years later you’re jockeying back and forth on the 38th parallel. It seemed so futile.”
“The less secure a man is, the more likely he is to have extreme prejudice.”
“The plan was, when I first started directing in the 1970s, to get more involved in production and directing so at some point in my life, when I decided I didn`t want to act anymore, I didn`t have to suit up. “
“There are a lot of great movies that have won the Academy Award, and a lot of great movies that haven’t. You just do the best you can.”
“There are a lot of young guys coming along, but I’d like to say to the various financiers, don’t forget the senior guys. The senior guys and gals are there, willing to do their best work for you.”
“There`s really no way to teach you how to act, but there is a way to teach you how to teach yourself to act. That`s kind of what it is; once you learn the little tricks that work for you, pretty soon you find yourself doing that. “
“There’s only one way to have a happy marriage and as soon as I learn what it is I’ll get married again.”
“They say marriages are made in Heaven. But so is thunder and lightning.”
“This film cost $31 million. With that kind of money I could have invaded some country. “
“To Eli Wallach prior to starting work on Buono, il brutto, il cattivo, Il (1966) (“The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly”) Never trust anyone on an Italian movie. I know about these things. Stay away from special effects and explosives. “
“We are like boxers one never knows how much longer one has”
“We boil at different degrees.”
“We live in more of a pussy generation now, where everybody’s become used to saying, “Well, how do we handle it psychologically?” In those days, you just punched the bully back and ducked it out. Even if the guy was older and could push you around, at least you were respected for fighting back, and you’d be left alone from then on.”
“We were doing In the Line of Fire, and John Malkovich was on top of the building, and he has me in a real precarious situation. My character is crazed and he pulls out a gun and sticks it into John’s face, and John puts his mouth over the end of the gun. Now, I don’t know what kind of crazy symbol that was. We certainly didn’t rehearse anything like that. I’m sure he didn’t think about it while we were practicing it. It was just there. Like Sir Edmund Hillary talking about why you do anything: Because it’s there. That’s why you climb Everest. It’s like a little moment in time, and as fast as it comes into your brain, you just throw it out and discard it. Does it before you discard it, you know?”
“What can they do to you after you get into your seventies?”
“What happened is I was going to college in 1950. L. A. City College. A guy I knew was going to an acting class on Thursday nights. He started telling me about all the good-look-in’ chicks and said, why don’t you go with me? So I probably had some motivation beyond thoughts of being an actor. And sure enough, he was right. There were a lot of girls and not many guys. I said, “Yeah, they need me here.” I wound up at Universal as a contract player.”
“What he says after a take, instead of “Cut!” That`s enough of that shit. “
“Whatever success I`ve had is due to a lot of instinct and a little luck.”"They say marriages are made in Heaven. But so is thunder and lightning. “
“When a naked man is chasing a woman through an alley with a butcher knife and a hard-on, I figure he isn’t out collecting for the Red Cross.”
“When asked if he has disappointed his conservative fans by directing Million Dollar Baby (2004) Well, I got a big laugh out of that. These people are always bitching about “Hollyweird”, and then they start bitching about this film. Are they all so mad b… “
“When asked if he is still registered as a Republican Yes, I am. I started – I enrolled as a Republican in 1951 when Dwight D. Eisenhower was running. And I was in the military. I was a fan of his. And that`s how I got started off. I was never – my paren… “
“When I was doing The Bridges of Madison County (1995), I said to me, “This romantic stuff is really tough. I can`t wait to get back to shooting and killing. “
“When you listen to Ray Charles, there’s never any doubt whose voice that is.”
“Winning the election is a good-news, bad-news kind of thing. Okay, now you’re the mayor. The bad news is, now you’re the mayor.”
“You can’t stop everything from happening. But we’ve gotten to a point where we’re certainly trying. If a car doesn’t have four hundred air bags in it, then it’s no good.”
“You have to trust your instincts. There`s a moment when an actor has it, and he knows it. Behind the camera you can feel the moment even more clearly. And once you`ve got it, once you feel it, you can`t second-guess yourself. You can find a million reasons… “
“You know when you think of a particular director, you think you would have liked to be with them on one particular film and not necessarily on some other one. “
“You look at Velázquez in his dark years and you wonder, how the hell did he get that way? I’m sure he didn’t say to Him, “I’m in my dark period right now, so I’m going to paint this way.” He just did it. That’s when real art gets a chance to come into play.”
“You should really get to know somebody, really be a friend. I mean, my wife is my closest friend. Sure, I’m attracted to her in every way possible, but that’s not the answer. Because I’ve been attracted to other people and I couldn’t stand them after a while.”
“You wonder sometimes. What will we do if something really big happens? Look how fast — seven years — people have been able to forget 9/11. Maybe you remember if you lost a relative or a loved one. But the public can get pretty blasé about stuff like that. Nobody got blasé about Pearl Harbor.”
“You`ve got to ask yourself one question: `Do I feel lucky?` Well, do ya punk?