These Sean Penn quotes will inspire you. Sean Justin Penn is an American actor, director, screenwriter, and producer. He has won two Academy Awards, for his roles in the mystery drama Mystic River (2003) and the biopic Milk (2008).
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging Sean Penn quotes, Sean Penn sayings, and Sean Penn proverbs.
Best Sean Penn Quotes
- “I like to believe that love is a reciprocal thing, that it can’t really be felt, truly, by one.” ~ Sean Penn
- “It’s only in innocence you find any kind of magic, any kind of courage.” ~ Sean Penn
- “Marriage ain’t easy, but it’s great most of the time.” ~ Sean Penn
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“There’s a lot of mediocrity being celebrated, and a lot of wonderful stuff being ignored or discouraged.” ~ Sean Penn
- “There is no shame in my saying that we all want to be loved.” ~ Sean Penn
- “If you don’t vote, you don’t matter.” ~ Sean Penn
- “Sense of self, and the way one shares it, is perhaps the most valuable and poetic gift in the arsenal of one’s life and craft.” ~ Sean Penn
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“When everything gets answered, it’s fake.” ~ Sean Penn
- “Women are the best. The toughest. The bane of my existence. And I’ll forever fall for it.” ~ Sean Penn
- “The bottom line is, you love your wife, you do your best with that.” ~ Sean Penn
- “My favorite thing to do is not act – it’s that simple.” ~ Sean Penn
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“If you can’t count on your heart having some kind of unified response, you can’t count on anything. You use your heart as a barometer for your movie’s completeness.” ~ Sean Penn
- “I’m not going to have a better day, a more magical moment than the first time I heard my daughter giggle.” ~ Sean Penn
- “I think we all have light and dark inside us.” ~ Sean Penn
- “I think that it is a good time for those who voted for the ban against gay marriage to sit and reflect and anticipate their great shame and the shame in their grandchildren’s eyes if they continue that way of support. We’ve got to have equal rights for everyone.” ~ Sean Penn
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“On a movie, it’s always better to stay invisible as much as you can to keep things calm. I like to whisper to my cameraman, I like to whisper to my actors, and whoever else I’ve gotten to whisper to.” ~ Sean Penn
- “That on a romantic level, if you feel it about somebody and it’s pure, it means that they do too.” ~ Sean Penn
- “I think life’s an irrational obsession.” ~ Sean Penn
- “So if we have anything original to offer, it’s to speak from our own life about the society we’re in.” ~ Sean Penn
- “Well, I’m pretty anti legends – I just don’t think they’re useful. So that certainly wouldn’t be my intention. But will it contribute to that? Sure. Any medicine can be mis-used. But I think that there is a great courage, innocence and magic to him that more than a legend is about connection.” ~ Sean Penn
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“I get a little scared of words like maturity.” ~ Sean Penn
- “That difference do you think you can make, one man in all this madness?” ~ Sean Penn
- “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.” ~ Sean Penn
- “In short form I’ll say it was an approach to the family and to [author] Jon Krakauer that then led to me seeming to rise to the top of the heap of several filmmakers that were trying to get the rights. And by top of the heap I mean in terms of being somebody that was trusted to do it as they said they were going to attempt to do it and that this way of doing it would be something they would be willing to allow.” ~ Sean Penn
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“If there’s anything disgusting about the movie business, it’s the whoredom of my peers.” ~ Sean Penn
- “I’m not going to recommend recklessness but somewhere just short of it – testing yourself and proactively pursuing a rite of passage has become necessary because in western developed countries we’ve become very comfort-addicted.” ~ Sean Penn
- “A child gets a fever in the United States and it’s high enough and sustainable enough, all of us can bring a child to an emergency room. Most Haitians never had that opportunity. They didn’t have the emergency room to bring them to. Virtually every time your child has 102 fever, you wait for it to die and you have no clean water to give it.” ~ Sean Penn
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“All I need are some tasty waves, a cool buzz, and I’m fine” ~ Sean Penn
- “Well, the kind of central question: “Do you want to live – and I don’t mean stay alive – do you want to feel your life while you’re living it?” You know, there’s somewhere to go that was here before we were and is going to be here after us, so get out there in it. It doesn’t take somebody who’s got some self-important sense of their own attachment to nature to recognise that you’re just stupid if you don’t go out there.” ~ Sean Penn
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“Whatever one considers art to be, there is in many people a hunger to express themselves creatively and to feel authentic in doing that.” ~ Sean Penn
- “I still think photographers should be lashed out at. They should be put in a cage where you can poke them with a stick for a quarter. But not in a hostile way, just for giggles. They really are on the attack against mankind; it’s a disease. They should be helped somewhere. But I’d still like to poke them with a stick.” ~ Sean Penn
- “I’m not good at talking to strangers, whether they’re sick children or they’re – I’m just not good. I’m shy with it.” ~ Sean Penn
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“Venezuela and its revolution will endure under the proven leadership of Vice President Maduro.” ~ Sean Penn
- “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.” ~ Sean Penn
- “There are a few directors around who I have some excitement about spending my $7 at the theatre watching their movies.” ~ Sean Penn
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“I’ve been a road-rat since I got my driver’s licence at 16, so I’ve probably gone across America 20 times.” ~ Sean Penn.
- “I do not believe in a simplistic and inflammatory view of good and evil. I believe this is a big world full of men, women, and children who struggle to eat, to love, to work, to protect their families, their beliefs, and their dreams.” ~ Sean Penn
- “It’s pretty much rock-‘n’-roll. I sit down and start feeling stuff and writing.” ~ Sean Penn
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“Oh, I’m a big-mouth. I said a lot of things.” ~ Sean Penn
- “A SWAT team surrounded my house and came in every door. But it happened because on the day that we split up, Madonna developed a concern that if she were to return to the house, she would get a very severe haircut.” ~ Sean Penn
- “The advice you give to young directors for sure is to go out and become some version of a successful movie actor. Do that first and say yes to people like Terrence Malick and Clint Eastwood and Woody Allen when they come and offer you movies. It’s a great front row seat to filmmaking.” ~ Sean Penn
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“The one thing you can count on in Hollywood – across the board – is cowardice.” ~ Sean Penn
- “I can tell you that my contribution based on my interpretation of the book is unchanged. The other things, in terms of doing the research and following the trail of it, were probably pretty similar to what I would have done then. I think that what makes me celebrate that it took the 10 years is the various other people and contributors that I ended up having on board.” ~ Sean Penn
- “Putting something in a movie because it’s in the news doesn’t make it political to me. If you’re not going outside the same old, same old, if you’re not pushing the envelope, then you’re not doing anything. A good movie is a political thing.” ~ Sean Penn
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“I’d do anything to get a performance, short of malice.” ~ Sean Penn
- “I just want real creative freedom without worrying about, you know, car payments.” ~ Sean Penn
- “There’s the old notion that where there’s choice, there’s chaos, and where there’s no choice, there’s clarity. If you’ve got no choice, you’ve gotta be there, and you’ve gotta have your heart in it. It leads to a much less self-conscious life.” ~ Sean Penn
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“Rebel is just as bad a word as maturity.” ~ Sean Penn
- “I don’t read newspapers too much , just because they tend to make me feel I have a political obligation that I think is a distraction from what my political offerings are going to be if I just make my movies.” ~ Sean Penn
- “I don’t see life as an opportunity to see how far you can go in the pursuit of pain, although I think I’ve challenged it a bit.” ~ Sean Penn
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“Child-rearing is my main interest now. I’m a hands-on father.” ~ Sean Penn
- “That was madness. You’re never going to bring one of those down with a handgun.” ~ Sean Penn
- “When I was growing up and somebody like Robert De Niro had a movie come out, it was a cultural event. Because he had such a confidence and a single mission that was so intimate.” ~ Sean Penn
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“I am a Justin Timberlake fan.” ~ Sean Penn
- “Today, maturity is a word I associate with spirituality. It’s one of those words that cause people to change their voice. When your voice gets higher because of what you’re saying, there’s a problem. To me, the conflict of life is part of the joy of life. There’s got to be a recognition of the friction that exists. Maturity seems somehow about getting careful. I don’t want to be careful.” ~ Sean Penn
- “You tolerate me. You really tolerate me!” ~ Sean Penn
- “The first instinct is love.” ~ Sean Penn
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“When I buy a Nikon camera, I have no tolerance for the instructions. I’m ready to make some mistakes using it and get some bad pictures back until I’ve figured it out for myself.” ~ Sean Penn
- “At this stage, what would be rewarding would be for audiences to want to watch.” ~ Sean Penn
- “You need governance, but you also need a middle class, you need agriculture, they need to be able to export. I think that’s probably the biggest issue, the job creation that could come with the kinds of things that Haiti has all the potential in the world to export.” ~ Sean Penn
- “Haiti kind of gets a hold of you.” ~ Sean Penn
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“I think if you want good things to happen for a country like Haiti, then you need to provide the circumstances where the Haitians can do that.” ~ 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.” ~ Sean Penn
- “There is a kind of sense of truth and reconciliation that is non-formalized, but it’s understood and accepted. Haitians are Haitians and there is an inherent loyalty that forgives an awful lot.” ~ Sean Penn
- “In between, I go broke because I seem to do movies where you’re not paid a lot as an actor.” ~ Sean Penn
