Val Kilmer

“I never had a business plan. I did, actually - I'm lying. My business plan was to get lucky, and I did; that was great. And then my second business plan was to get lucky again, and there, I faltered.”

“I can safely say that no one who has ever won an Oscar didn't want to win an Oscar.”

“News isn't even the truth on television.”

“A wonderful but kind of a terrible truth about acting is that you actually get to a point where you become content with an impossible task: it is really impossible to properly prepare. You kind of have to start over every time.”

“Acting is very immediate.”

“I just don't think I've ever been comfortable at public functions and selling myself as an entity.”

“My children have absolutely no interest in my fame. They're very sophisticated, and they have a spiritual perspective on material things because we go to church.”

“I think part of my reputation has to do with the difficult roles I've played. Actors do tend to get identified with their characters.”

“I think death is just a transition to another state of consciousness.”

“That's the joy of art - it should be dangerous and challenging but it's just art - it's safe.”

“When you're young, you're always concerned about how you're being seen and how you're being criticized.”

“Unless a Western's made money - doesn't matter who made the money, doesn't matter what the subject is - if the last one didn't make any money, you can't make another one for a four-year period. Westerns more than any genre.”

“I am not an American; I am the American.”

“It's fun to look at people that are so good at acting that aren't actors, like David Bowie creating a mystique about rock n' roll. I've listened to 'Ziggy Stardust' as much as any rock n' roll fan - I don't really know what it's about, but it sure is fun to think about David Bowie as this mad creation.”

“Warner Bros offered me the next Batman, and the only reason that I didn't do it was because of The Saint.”

“You just don't understand humility until you have children and get divorced.”

“The good reviews that people have told me about through the years haven't really helped me do my job. So it's kind of like, if your hair turns out right you want to go out, you don't just want to stay in and look in the mirror. That's kind of what reading a review is like to me; it's like reveling in something that's just one night.”

“I'm going to put a museum on my ranch and people keep saying, 'That's a huge idea.' Yeah, it's big, but not bigger than the average big movie. A hundred million dollars in the art world is a substantial amount of cash to do anything. That's maybe a big gallery's total sales for a given year.”

“Without deadlines and restrictions I just tend to become preoccupied with other things.”

“If you think that by threatening me you can get me to do what you want... well, that's where you're right. But - and I am only saying this because I care - there's a lot of decaffeinated brands on the market that are just as tasty as the real thing.”