A biography for Mickey Rourkehasn’t been written yet.
“Sometimes, when a man is alone, that's all you got is your dog.”
“My dogs are more important than my family.”
“Once you've been somebody, really, you have a career and you're a nobody anymore, and you're getting older, you're living what's called a state of shame.”
“There's always going to be a war going on inside of me. That's just, I think, my make-up.”
“I never look backwards. I have always been an athlete. I boxed before I acted.”
“Hollywood's famous for putting you in a box.”
“I never knew my father, and I'd hate to repeat that kind of cycle with my own children, because I'd also want to be there for them no matter what.”
“The hardest thing in life to do is to change.”
“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.”
“You know, back in acting school they always teach you, 'Make bold choices and look for activities that are interesting.'”
“It's the formulaic studio movies the make money, and when they do, the actors in them are automatically movie stars.”
“Wrestling and boxing is like Ping-Pong and rugby. There's no connection.”
“Very few men can fall as far as I have and come back. People see me and it's like they've seen a ghost, like I'm back from the dead.”
“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.”
“A reputation is really hard to live down.”
“All that prosthetic makeup drains you. By the time it's lunch, you're done.”
“I try to find the right director who won't compromise his or anyone else's integrity, and yet be political enough to give the studio what they want, yet put up a fight to maintain that integrity.”
“Some of your worst gangsters are guys who were very low-key.”
“I had a lot of anger inside me and that came out at times that were not particularly advantageous to me career-wise.”
“Mitch Glazer and I went to high school together, and his mother was my English teacher for two years. She was my favorite teacher, and I followed Mitch's career as a journalist, so we've kind of kept in touch over the years.”