Brando

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• The more sensitive you are, the more likely you are to be brutalised, develop scabs and never evolve. Never allow yourself to feel anything because you always feel too much.
• An actor is at most a poet and at least an entertainer.
• I don't know what people expect when they meet me. They seem to be afraid that I'm going to piss in the potted palm and slap them on the ass.
• I put on an act sometimes, and people think I'm insensitive. Really, it's like a kind of armour because I'm too sensitive. If there are two hundred people in a room and one of them doesn't like me, I've got to get out.
• If you're successful, acting is about as soft a job as anybody could ever wish for. But if you're unsuccessful, it's worse than having a skin disease.
• [on one of his most famous characters, Stanley Kowalski from A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)] Kowalski was always right, and never afraid. He never wondered, he never doubted. His ego was very secure. And he had the kind of brutal aggressiveness that I hate. I'm afraid of it. I detest the character.
• I don't want to spread the peanut butter of my personality on the mouldy bread of the commercial press.
• [on Frank Sinatra] He's the kind of guy that when he dies, he's going up to heaven and give God a bad time for making him bald.
• Regret is useless in life. It's in the past. All we have is now.
• Acting is the expression of a neurotic impulse. It's a bum's life. Quitting acting is a sign of maturity.
• It seems to me hilarious that our government put the face of Elvis Presley on a postage stamp after he died from an overdose of drugs. His fans don't mention that because they don't want to give up their myths. They ignore the fact that he was a drug addict and claim he invented rock 'n' roll when in fact he took it from black culture; they had been singing that way for years before he came along, copied them and became a star
• Most people want those fantasies of those who are worthy of our hate - we get rid of a lot of anger that way; and of those who are worthy of our idolatry. Whether it's Farrah Fawcett or somebody else, it doesn't make a difference. They're easily replaceable units, pick 'em out like a card file. Johnnie Ray enjoyed that kind of hysterical popularity, celebration, and then suddenly he wasn't there anymore. The Beatles are now nobody in particular. Once they set screaming crowds running after them, they ran in fear of their lives, they had special tunnels for them. They can walk almost anyplace now. Because the fantasy is gone. Elvis Presley - bloated, over the hill, adolescent entertainer, suddenly drawing people into Las Vegas - had nothing to do with excellence, just myth. It's convenient for people to believe that something is wonderful, therefore they're wonderful.
• The only reason I'm in Hollywood is that I don't have the moral courage to refuse the money.
• [1976] Homosexuality is so much in fashion it no longer makes news. Like a large number of men, I, too, have had homosexual experiences and I am not ashamed. I have never paid much attention to what people think about me. But if there is someone who is convinced that Jack Nicholson and I are lovers, may they continue to do so. I find it amusing.
• Regrets belong to the past.
• I come from a long line of Irish drunks.
• I know it can be hard for a troubled kid like James Dean to have to live up to sudden fame and the ballyhoo Hollywood created around him. I saw it happen to Marilyn Monroe and I also knew it from my own experience. In trying to copy me, I think Jimmy was only attempting to deal with these insecurities, but I told him it was a mistake.
• With so much prejudice, racial discrimination, injustice, hatred, poverty, starvation and suffering in the world, making movies seemed increasingly silly and irrelevant.
• Food has always been my friend. When I wanted to feel better or had a crisis in my life, I opened the icebox.
• I hated authority and did everything I could to defeat it by resisting it, subverting it, tricking it and outmaneuvering it. I would do anything to avoid being treated like a cipher.
• I don't know Woody Allen, but I like him very much. I saw Annie Hall (1977) -- enjoyed it enormously, He's an important man. Woody Allen can't make any sense out of this world and he really tells wonderful jokes about it. Don't you think it was remarkable that his time came to get his door prize at the Academy Awards and he stayed home and played his clarinet? That was as witty and funny a thing as you could do.
• [On Charles Chaplin] A remarkable talent but a monster of a man.
• If an actor can't improvise, then perhaps the producer's wife cast him in that part. You wouldn't be in the film with such a person. Some actors don't like it. Laurence Olivier doesn't like to improvise; everything is structured and his roles are all according to an almost architectural plan.
• We've somehow substituted craft for art and cleverness for craft. It's revolting! It's disgusting that people talk about art and they haven't got the right to use the word. It doesn't belong on anybody's tongue in this century. There are no artists. We are businessmen. We're merchants. There is no art. Pablo Picasso was the last one I would call an artist.
• If you've made a hit movie, then you get the full 32-teeth display in some places; and if you've sort of faded, they say, "Are you still making movies? I remember that picture, blah blah blah." And so it goes. The point of all this is, people are interested in people who are successful.
• (On Hollywood) A small-minded little town in the middle of nowhere.