Mickey Rourke

“I still work out most days. When I do it, I go full blast five or six days a week, two to three hours a day. I enjoy it. It's therapeutic for me.”

“Where I come from, being a hard man is being able to take a good beating and then get back up again and carry on fighting.”

“Usually if you read a screenplay, no matter who's writing it, the bad guy is always written as a one-dimensional bad guy.”

“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.”

“I didn't have a childhood, really, because I worked my whole life and... other reasons. So when I had some success, I went ballistic. That was my childhood, and the party kept going on.”

“I'd just as soon do a big-budget movie as an independent one.”

“The acclaim I'm getting for 'The Wrestler' means everything in the world to me. But it also means I can't take my foot off the gas pedal.”

“A lot of those who let you down are those who seemed the closest to you.”

“In boxing, you don't know what's going to happen. In wrestling, it's already prearranged.”

“When you're young, working in a warehouse or selling hot dogs, you look at work - at acting - as something precious. It gets you out of the stink.”

“I'm only as rich as my next film.”

“You want to earn respect in your old age. You want to walk into a restaurant and have people say: 'There's Mickey Rourke. He was great in 'The Wrestler.' You don't want them jumping out of windows.”

“Acting was never my first choice as a profession, but I came to terms with it when I decided I better buckle down and be the best I can be at it.”

“You can be mediocre, the way most actors are, and you can still be a top movie star, even if your movies are boring and predictable. All you have to do is know how to sell yourself, let yourself be manufactured.”

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