Welcome to our collection of quotes (with shareable picture quotes) by Clint Eastwood. We hope you enjoy pondering them and that you will share them widely.
Wikipedia Summary for Clint Eastwood
Clinton Eastwood Jr. (born May 31, 1930) is an American actor, film director, composer, and producer. After achieving success in the Western TV series Rawhide, he rose to international fame with his role as the "Man with No Name" in Italian filmmaker Sergio Leone's "Dollars Trilogy" of Spaghetti Westerns during the mid-1960s, and as antihero cop Harry Callahan in the five Dirty Harry films throughout the 1970s and 1980s. These roles, among others, have made Eastwood an enduring cultural icon of masculinity. His accolades include four Academy Awards, four Golden Globe Awards, three César Awards, and an AFI Life Achievement Award.
An Academy Award nominee for Best Actor, Eastwood won Best Director and Best Picture for his Western film Unforgiven (1992) and his sports drama Million Dollar Baby (2004). His greatest commercial successes are the adventure comedy Every Which Way but Loose (1978) and its action comedy sequel Any Which Way You Can (1980). Other popular Eastwood films include the Westerns Hang 'Em High (1968) and Pale Rider (1985), the prison film Escape from Alcatraz (1979), the war film Heartbreak Ridge (1986), the action film In the Line of Fire (1993), and the romantic drama The Bridges of Madison County (1995). More recent works are Gran Torino (2008), The Mule (2018), and the upcoming film Cry Macho (2021). Since 1967, Eastwood's company Malpaso Productions has produced all but four of his American films.
In addition to directing many of his own star vehicles, Eastwood has also directed films in which he did not appear, such as the mystery drama Mystic River (2003) and the war film Letters from Iwo Jima (2006), for which he received Academy Award nominations, the drama Changeling (2008), and the biographical sports drama Invictus (2009). The war drama biopic American Sniper (2014) set box-office records for the largest January release ever and was also the largest opening ever for an Eastwood film.
Elected in 1986, Eastwood served for two years as the mayor of Carmel-by-the-Sea, California. In 2000, Eastwood received the Italian Venice Film Festival's Golden Lion award, honoring his lifetime achievements. Bestowed two of France's highest civilian honors, he received the Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1994, and the Legion of Honour medal in 2007.
Yes, I'm always -- I'm always surprised when you make a film and you live with it a while and you put it out, you never dream that anybody is ever going to want to really see it.
It's always appealing to play a character that has to overcome himself as well as an obstacle. It makes the drama so much deeper.
I have strong feelings about gun control. If there's a gun around, I want to be controlling it.
As much as I love the Western genre, I figured if I kept doing those, I'd eventually run out of steam on that, and that would've been the end of it.
Acting to me is a very organic art form and you just go and do it. And I like to direct the same way that I like to be directed. Let me bring in what I want to bring in, and if something's wrong, just tell me about it and I'll make some corrections or adjustments. And that's what I do.
In America, instead of making the audience come to the film, the idea seems to be for you to go to the audience. They come up with the demographics for the film and then the film is made and sold strictly to that audience.
My father had a couple of kids at the beginning of the Depression. There was not much employment. Not much welfare. People barely got by. People were tougher then.
Extremism is so easy. You've got your position, and that's it. It doesn't take much thought. And when you go far enough to the right you meet the same idiots coming around from the left.
Longer Version:
Extremism is so easy. You've got your position, and that's it. It doesn't take much thought. And when you go far enough to the right you meet the same idiots coming around from the left.
(Interview, Time Magazine, February 20, 2005).
FBI philosophy is Go ahead and make the story you want to make, and hopefully we'll love it. So that's that.
I always felt blessed that I was able to make a living in a profession acting that not a lot of people can make a living at, and I was able to do something I liked, rather than be in a job that I hated.
Don Siegel last advice to me was 'Don't short yourself.' He said the tendency is when an actor's directing is to kind of you want to work on everybody else but you're going to short yourself. He said, take the time to do a good job with yourself so that you're satisfied with it.
I think as you get older, you find you can play more things because you're moving to a different category. You play a certain thing as a younger man, playing action roles like I did. Then I moved out, and I kept trying to do different things all the time.
If you get a certain amount of notoriety for doing something, and you can stick to that type of project for the rest of your life and make a decent living, I think you still have a responsibility to stretch. Flexibility is what keeps you alive.
You spend your life training to be an actor, observing people's characteristics so that you can design characters around what you've seen.
I'm suffering from oxygen deprivation. It's overwhelming watching your career go by.
I don't believe in pessimism.
Longer Version:
I don't believe in pessimism. If something doesn't come up the way you want, forge ahead. If you think it's going to rain, it will.
I'm trying to preach the idea that if we don't pay attention to history we're destined to repeat it.
I am sort of anti-hunting. I don't put down what anyone wants to do, but it seems to me that killing a creature for fun is not a progressive idea.
Hitchcock used to believe that if there were three or four memorable scenes in a film that would be enough to drive it, but I don't know if that's true or not.
Hollywood seems to succumb to fads. Well, action films do well. Give me violence. Give me a scene where there's a couple of car chases or shooting and stuff like that. They're forgetting the fact that there's a basic structure to a story that is essential to making it really broad and appealing.
I found out that a lot of my liberal friends weren't liberal because they weren't liberal about approaching anybody else's ideas, or at least standing for it. They started getting really animalistic about, I can't even associate with this guy. He's stupid. He's an idiot.
Directing is more like you're being a psychologist and you're kind of analyzing the situation and evaluating each person for their idiosyncrasies.
I'd say, go ahead, shoot your shot. More power to ya if you can come up with a different angle on the character.
I'm just naturally gravitating towards different things. As you mature, different subject matters. And as you're older, you can't play as many parts, or you shouldn't be playing the parts that you used to play. But also there's the opportunity to play parts that you couldn't have.
When you're making a film you start living with it, and I find myself sitting down and figuring out a sound or melody that would go with a film, or a particular period. It's not brain surgery, you just kind of feel it along.
When you're an actor, you're so busy: people are always coming up to you and pulling your collar, making sure that things fit, brushing your hair and you're always being yanked up, so finally when you're behind a camera, you're just a slob.
My wife is my closest friend. Sure, I'm attracted to her in every way possible, but that's not the answer. Because I've been attracted to other people, and I couldn't stand 'em after a while.
I guess a great movie would be one that has the most great moments in it.
Most people are afraid of change, but if you look at it as something you can always count on, then it can be a comfort.
If you're afraid to take risks in anything in life, it's just boredom.
An awful lot of good movies have gone unrecognized, and an awful lot of bad movies have had tremendous recognition. As long as you keep that in mind, you are never really disappointed.
I'm past doing one chin-up more than I did the day before. I just kind of do what I feel like.
Michael Moore and I actually have a lot in common. We both appreciate living in a country where there's free expression. But Michael, if you ever show up at my front door with a camera, I'll kill you. I mean it.
Hillary Clinton has made a lot of dough out of being a politician. I gave up dough to be a politician. I'm sure that Ronald Reagan gave up dough to be a politician.
If you approach a film with the feeling that you are going to have some impact on society then you're liable to get carried away with yourself. Alfred Hitchcock once told me, when I was analyzing a lot of things about his pictures, Clint, you must remember, it's only a movie.
What Trump is onto is, he's just saying what's on his mind. And sometimes it's not so good. And sometimes it's... I mean, I can understand where he's coming from, but I don't always agree with it.
I'd like to be a bigger and more knowledgeable person ten years from now than I am today. I think that for all of us as we grow older, we must discipline ourselves to continue expanding, broadening, learning, keeping our minds active and open.
To me, life is like the back nine in golf. Sometimes you play better on the back nine. You may not be stronger, but hopefully you're wiser. And if you keep most of your marbles intact, you can add a note of wisdom to the coming generation.
A lot of people when they retire, they just expire. It happens to men more than women. Women usually have great interest in the family, because the family's always growing and they're always coming to the rescue.
Acting gets into your blood, after so many years, and I just always like revisiting it. It's fun to meet new people and watch them coming along, at different stages of their careers.
Everybody wants to make something they think is a surefire winner, though nobody knows what a surefire winner is, in my opinion.
Nobody knows diddly. They just think they do. And the people that think they know the most know the least.
When a naked man is chasing a woman through an alley with a butcher knife and a hard-on, I figure he isn't out collecting for the Red Cross.
If anybody asks me what I attribute the longevity of my career to, then I say it's because I was never satisfied with being a cowboy in the plains of Spain and later I was never satisfied with just playing a detective in San Francisco, and constantly just pushing the envelope.
Listen, punk. To me you're nothin' but dogshit, you understand? And a lot of things can happen to dogshit. It can be scraped up with a shovel off the ground. It can dry up and blow away in the wind. Or it can be stepped on and squashed. So take my advice and be careful where the dog shits ya!
The more time you have to think things through, the more you have to screw it up.
Twenty-some states in the United States have statutes that say showing the nipples to children is obscene. That's the first thing we come into contact with when we arrive on this planet: a woman's breasts!
There was a stool there, and some fella kept asking me if I wanted to sit down. When I saw the stool sitting there, it gave me the idea. I'll just put the stool out there and I'll talk to Mr Obama and ask him why he didn't keep all of the promises he made to everybody.
Over my career I played some badass characters. So, people sometimes think I should have a .44 magnum. But that's not true, I don't have that. But I do fire them and I do enjoy target shooting and all that sort of thing. I'm not much of a hunter. I don't like killing animals, but I love to shoot.
Everybody is looking for a reason to not to take responsibility for their own actions in hand.
I'd have to go for Donald Trump ... you know, 'cause Hillary Clinton is declared that she's gonna follow in Barack Obama's footsteps. There's been just too much funny business on both sides of the aisle. She's made a lot of dough out of being a politician.
I don't see myself as conservative, but I'm not ultra-leftist. You build a philosophy of your own. I like the libertarian view, which is to leave everyone alone. Even as a kid, I was annoyed by people who wanted to tell everyone how to live.
If you cast a film incorrectly, then you're going to be fighting an uphill battle.
What do you want me to tell Romney? I can't tell him to do that. I can't tell him to do that to himself. You're crazy. You're absolutely crazy. You're getting as bad as Biden.
Well, if you're waitin' for a woman to make up her mind, you may have a a long wait.
Ever notice how you come across somebody once in a while you shouldn't have messed with? That's me.
No, I don't have to practice that grunt. You just do it. Once you're in character, you're in character. You don't sit there purposely thinking, Well, I'll grunt here, or I'll groan there.
Once you finish a film, it doesn't belong to you anymore -- it belongs to the audience to interpret it the way they feel like interpreting.
I have great respect for the FBI, and I know that there have been some rumors lately that the FBI was disenchanted because of what we were doing in story, or doing a certain take: that's not true. Actually the FBI was tremendously enthusiastic about us doing J. Edgar Hoover film.
If you read any of the biographies on J. Edgar Hoover, you find that they contradict each other more than they agree. Often times, they're often told from a political perspective.
I think the only way it has influenced me is to cause me to try to branch out and do other things. So that people will know that I am reaching out and trying to be a little more versatile. So they realize he is not a Dirty Harry. He doesn't advocate martial law or mayhem -it's a character.
Now you've got to ask yourself one question. Do I feel lucky? -- Inspector Harry Callahan.
I always thought what an interesting idea because almost everybody's fascinated by the perpetrator of a crime; very few people study what happens to people for the rest of their lives, and how it affects not only that particular character but other characters around him as well.
The interesting thing with child actors is that kids are natural actors. They're wonderful actors, and most kids are acting all the time. They're imagining they're out in the yard playing. They're imagining that things happened, and they can get very vivid.
I'm not really a Hollywood person. Not that I don't like L.A., but I'm just a Northern California guy.
I love every aspect of the creation of motion pictures and I guess I am committed to it for life.
As a movie actor, once you've become known, you're observed all the time so you don't get the chance to observe anymore. You still get a taste of life but it's not quite the same and there's something to be said for a more anonymous life.
Kids piercing themselves, piercing their tongues, what kind of masochism is that? Is it to show you can just take it?
In recent times it just seems that women have been relegated to either romantic roles or fluff pieces. So the appeal, for me, is to make a picture about a real woman.
Most people who'll remember me, if at all, will remember me as an action guy, which is okay. There's nothing wrong with that. But there will be a certain group which will remember me for the other films, the ones where I took a few chances. At least, I like to think so.
The reason I don't retire is that I learn something new every day. The brain has to be exercised the same as the rest of the body. It's about expanding, constantly pushing yourself.
There's a lot of young guys coming along, but I'd like to say to the various financiers, don't forget the senior guys. The senior guys and gals are there, willing to do their best work for you.
