A couple of guys won Academy Awards for the things that I turned down. Today, after coming to terms with everything, after being in therapy for a long time-there are areas where I will compromise.
Mickey Rourke

A lot of the stuff I am now seeing is edgy, raw kinda material.
Mickey Rourke

All I am hoping for is to be able to work - I think my best work is still ahead of me - I think all that I have been through in the last several years have only made me a better, more interesting actor.
Mickey Rourke

All that prosthetic makeup drains you. By the time it's lunch, you're done.
Mickey Rourke

Comeback is a good word, man.
Mickey Rourke

I always knew I'd accomplish something very special - like robbing a bank perhaps.
Mickey Rourke

I did think for many, many years that because of my ability I could beat the system. And I was wrong.
Mickey Rourke

I had a bonding problem when I went off and boxed for five years. I was over in Europe and Asia fighting because I wanted to do something different; I was tired of acting. But the thing is, when I was done doing that, I couldn't get a job.
Mickey Rourke

I had a lot of anger inside me and that came out at times that were not particularly advantageous to me career-wise.
Mickey Rourke

I had some things I had to fix. It took me 14 years to do it. But it was never really fun back in the day to work with directors who were a lot older and were like authoritarian and talking to you like that.
Mickey Rourke


I never look backwards. I have always been an athlete. I boxed before I acted.
Mickey Rourke

I started to shortcircuit because I had high aspirations for the film. I never told anybody that.
Mickey Rourke

I trained like an animal, but the thing is focus and concentration. When the bell rings it's like when the little red light goes on over the camera. And I can usually nail my lines on the first or second take because I'm right there.
Mickey Rourke

I was very immature when I was young, and for me there was no balance. Everything was just all or nothing.
Mickey Rourke

It was either therapy or die.
Mickey Rourke

It was the most fun I've ever had on a movie. It was one of the happiest times in my life. I was living in New York, and I really enjoyed acting at the time. Also, it's funny because that was also the time when I went downhill.
Mickey Rourke

It's the formulaic studio movies the make money, and when they do, the actors in them are automatically movie stars.
Mickey Rourke

What I've got to do now is let them judge me for who I am as an actor and not for my notoriety.
Mickey Rourke

Years ago I realized that maybe I made mistake, politically, when I turned a lot of that stuff down. I would go off to obscure places and make movies that six people went to see.
Mickey Rourke