
For an actor, its great fun to play one of these hungry white sharks. Audiences love to hate them.

It's difficult for me to meet women because my crowd is much older. I know that for some of the young women I do meet, a relationship with me can be envisioned as a benefit to their career.

I've always tried to kind of stretch my wings as an actor and do things that are different.

I'm not a big filmophile. I don't watch movies a lot for a hobby. I spend all my time watching sporting events. Because, opposed to movies, you can never tell how they're going to end.

I am a Jew. Those are four words of pride. My Jewishness is as deep as my genes.

Basketball is great; no one in Europe seems to believe just how close the spectators can sit to the players.

A fool and his money are lucky enough to get together in the first place.

What's worth doing is worth doing for money.

Everything's so repressive now - it's the No generation. You can't do anything, you can't eat anything, you have to abstain.
![Since Catherine [Zeta-Jones] and I got together, I've cut back dramatically. My priorities changed, and I still love acting and all that, but not as much as I love watching my two kids grow up.](https://quotes.thefamouspeople.com/images/quotes/michael-douglas-119606.jpg)
Since Catherine [Zeta-Jones] and I got together, I've cut back dramatically. My priorities changed, and I still love acting and all that, but not as much as I love watching my two kids grow up.

Even when you're acting with a producing hat, when you're in every scene, you're really conscious of trying to make everybody as good as they are, because ultimately you're trying to make the best movie possible.

Human Rights for everyone is the necessary foundation upon which all of us may build a world where everybody may live in peace and serenity and plenty.

I dont know about Brad Pitt leaving that beautiful woman to go hold orphans for Angelina. I mean how long is that going to last?

The history of second-generation actors isn't great in our industry.

In this whole digital age, where everything is so exposed, rather than trying to keep something private, you try to get out ahead of the curve and limit the amount of gossip.

Greed is good! Greed is right! Greed works! Greed will save the U.S.A.!

Suddenly you've worked yourself up to the top of the pecking order and you say to yourself, okay, this is going to be fun.

That's why I'm such a big sports fan, with sports you can never guess what's gonna happen. Most movies you get halfway through and you can kind of guess the ending.

There's nothing like a family crisis, especially a divorce, to force a person to re-evaluate his life.

It's a phenomenon that I see with young actors - a lot of American speaking parts going to British actors.

When you're making pictures out of heartfelt passion, it hurts when someone calls them a calculated business move.

Greed, for lack of a better word, is good.

Never knew how poor I was until I started making money.

Someone reminded me I once said, 'Greed is good.' Now it seems it's legal.

My brain cannot conceive how old my body is.

Wherever arms flow, violence follows. Bullets replace ballots as the solution to political disputes.

I'm impressed with the people from Chicago. Hollywood is hype, New York is talk, Chicago is work.

Oh, I get it, it's simple. PG means the hero gets the girl, 15 means that the villain gets the girl, and 18 means everybody gets the girl.

Money itself isn’t lost or made. It’s simply transferred from one perception to another.

You have to make entertaining movies. But like a good meal, it's nice to have a little food for thought after you walk out of the theater rather than just wiling away a couple of hours.

We must unite to make nuclear weapons a horror of the past.

Cigar smoking by it's very nature is much more reflective than interactive.

Relationships are like bubbles – they’re fragile.

Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies and cuts through to the essence of the evolutionary spirit.

Cancer did not bring me to my knees, it brought me to my feet.

It's all about bucks, kid. The rest is conversation.

Being single is pretty good. It's a nice sense of irresponsibility.

Players never die - they just try their luck at another table.

Out there is nothing but possibilities.

If we confront anti-Semitism ... if we combat it individually and as a society, and use whatever platform we have to denounce it, we can stop the spread of this madness.

I don't look good in tights. I know that.

I've just kind of been used to carrying movies. I look back and I'm just used to being in every single scene in a lot of pictures.

'King of California' was just, I thought, a really great, fresh, original kind of script. I loved the tone, the mix of tragedy, comedy, and drama, and that it was a good part.

Every empire eventually falls.

My mother is Bermudan, so I had a lot of memories when I was a kid, used to go down to Bermuda a lot.

'Five Easy Pieces,' 'Easy Rider' - those are indie pictures; those were not studio pictures. They had relationships with studio distribution, but they were indies.

'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest,' which my father had tried to get made for six, seven years, and I for four, was turned down by every studio. Every studio in the world had passed on it.

The so-called 'last golden age,' in the 1970s, most of those movies were independent films.

I think the quality of television, given the amount of time you have, how short you have, is proportionally so much better than most movies.

All the pictures I do are contemporary. I've sort of discovered I haven't really been into science fiction or period pictures. And so, in that vein, psychological thrillers play a big part.

I had a great stepfather.

I was undeclared. I was in my third year of school. They said you have to decide upon a major, and my father was an actor. My mother was an actress. So, I thought theater might be the way to go.

Celebrity gets you access to world leaders.

Capitalism is part of our system, but it's not for the faint of heart.

I've always liked Tina Turner.

When I was working on pictures with my father, there were a couple leading ladies to whom I wish I'd expressed how I felt rather than being too cool or too shy.

The people who work in Wall Street still look up to Gordon Gekko. He's sort of a guru.

I never really look at my movies.

I have hardly ever worked with the same director twice. But when you have worked with a director before, you understand his behavior.

'Wall Street' was a very important movie for me in terms of my career. I won an Oscar, and then the film 'Fatal Attraction' came right after it.

I've never been one to carefully calculate my career decisions, to sit on the outside looking in. I go with my passion and what moves me.

There is something about seeing rhinos and lions running free that excites you. It's not that you feel afraid; it's more like you're liberated by seeing them.

If your work isn't exciting, doesn't stir the emotions, where's the challenge? Where's the progress if you always play it safe?

Learning patience was not an easy lesson.

Kids know. They know everything. I would err on the side of pretty much sharing everything.

When you've accomplished a certain amount in your career, you're not so focused on your ambitions.

I tell my kids they are going to live to over 100.

I think sometimes in relationships, ladies like having a man who takes care of them, nurtures them. If you can't find it in a man your own age, you find it in somebody who is older.

Chemotherapy takes its toll; the more you keep doing it, you lose your energy, and it gets more difficult to swallow.

I haven't played a lot of nice guys.

Liberace was a lovely guy.

The thing with cancer is that you want to get it as early as you can.

Of course it's important to make mistakes, as long as you grow from them.

I've taken blame about being a bad father - if being a bad father is working your butt off trying to create a career at one time.

To me, Bermuda is a real family spot.

Cancer has shown me what family is. It showed me a love that I never knew really existed.

I went into rehab to save my marriage, but I wound up saving myself.

It took me too long to realise that if you go to a marriage counsellor to resolve problems, it's in his interest to keep the marriage going.

My daughter is a horseback rider, so I try to watch her ride; we take holidays together.

I love kids, and I love having had this second chance to have a family.

I thought I could never be the actor Dad was, so I avoided it for a while.

During my first marriage, my career was the most important thing in my life.

There are not a lot of sons or daughters of actors who have made it. Hollywood is awash with failures.

Like my father, like most actors, I was a pretty ambitious guy.

My father did 90-plus films. He was Spartacus!

Paul Rudd is ripped.

I don't wish ill will on anybody.

In the movie 'Wall Street' I play Gordon Gekko, a greedy corporate executive who cheated to profit while innocent investors lost their savings. The movie was fiction, but the problem is real.

If a deal looks too good to be true, it probably is.

Our economy is increasingly dependent on the success and integrity of the financial markets.

The quality of health care in Canada is excellent.

I don't think tongue cancer is the best cancer for an actor.

I have some idea of the pressure of finding your own identity with a famous father.

Religion has certainly been shoved down my throat.

I try not to dwell too much on a bad marriage.

Most of the stories I read are about my Hollywood pedigree.

My mother and father met at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. He was a senior and she was a junior, and their marriage didn't last very long.

I come from a tough stock.

I guess there are some women who like older men, but it's a smaller group.

Serious is when they tell you, 'You've got cancer.' Cancer is serious, but then the rest of it is not.

I don't ever do those kind of epic, huge, green-screen movies.

For a long time, I can't say I was one who really enjoyed acting. I was always censoring it, or editing it, or analyzing it, rather than just going with it.