Quotes by Val Kilmer

There are a thousand ways to play any role.

Hollywood is wonderful, but it does eat its young.

I love that Bob Dylan asked me to be in the first movie he wrote.

There are lots of actors who are awful people, but nobody talks about them being awful because they've made billions.

Give me the compliments. I love compliments. I was born modest, but it wore off.

It sounds corny to say, but the theater is sacred; something transcendent can occur, and when it does, everyone grows. It's a true communion.

I saw the horizon. It's out there. And though I may not ever be able to touch it, it's worth reaching for.

I'm not just an actor born in L.A. I was born in the Griffith Park Hospital. You can't get any more clichéd than that.

You can ask anyone who knows me, I've never said a racist or prejudiced thing in my life.

I'm a better person when I'm preparing for a role, when I'm studying a role.

Mark Twain is a universe, and he is also a kind of American authority figure. He can say things to America that other people can't say, in a way that can truly be heard.

I never cultivated a personality. Almost everyone who is really famous has cultivated a personality.

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.

My only business plan was to get lucky.

I don't believe in death. I think it's just a state of mind.

There are some directors I should have worked with. I'd like to have worked with Robert Altman -- I turned him down a couple of times when I was younger. My thing now is if it's a good director I'll never say no -- I'm just gonna say yes from now on.

Art is a way to get strength from something that is life-affirming. It can be quite violent and still be life-affirming.

My first girlfriend in high school, I had a girlfriend in grade school, but my first girlfriend in high school was Mare Winningham, very fine actress.

You just don't understand humility until you have children and get divorced. I was very hurt and very angry and so was she. But when kids are involved, you either become friends with respect or you become mortal enemies.

Big movies are fun and it's great to fly on private jets and make a lot of money and all the things that are connected with Hollywood, but they take a lot of your own life.

I was looking for projects, as you always are, and I read this scene ... and I'm in the Hollywood Hills. So I thought, 'This is interesting.' You have this setup that seems to be based in some reality and you can only wonder where Black's going to go with this.

It seems to me that every step forward in my life has been one that brings me to a better understanding of this: that you do your thing every day the best that you can, and you approach any success at it with humility.

It was very serious and I wanted to do something really different so there was this comedy called TOP SECRET.

I went to public school in L.A., so I felt like I'd been in a coma for three years. I woke up, and moved to New York.

It may or may not sound pretentious. But I've turned down, consciously and specifically, many jobs I knew would have been a pretty surefire way to go about making a lot of money, being recognized and gaining power in the industry.

I learned a long time ago that place matters to me, on many levels, and maybe more than it should, but it is generally counter-productive for me to resist it.

A hundred million dollars in the art world is a substantial amount of cash to do anything.

I was in love with Tina Goodman since I was three and her parents came popping out of the trash cans. I think it made a big impression on me.

Peter Sellers was just a brilliant actor, and also comedic.

In order to be an artist and an actor, like tackling the classics in the theater as well as film, there's lots of discipline, lots of work, physical work put in.

It is a weird thing that actors have people applaud when they're done working. I still find that entertaining.

Warren Beatty once told me that if someone's really stuck on you, find them their next boyfriend. But I could never do that.

Performing in a live theater is absolutely unbeatable. It is something I have done my entire life and have a gift, it seems, for sharing thoughts live.

I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates when he said...I drank what?

Sometimes, I wonder what I'm doing back in Los Angeles, but when you look out there... How can you complain when you see a whale cresting, matter-of-factly, as you make your breakfast?

I fell in love with the land and with the very old fashioned idea of leaving a physical legacy for my children. A stunning place, with a magnificent forest of trees, and a magnificent river.

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.

Everything in high school was reversed. If marijuana was supposed to make you mellow, I would be like, The cops, the cops, the cops... I was what you call the buzz kill.

YouTube is a new experience for me-someone threw a laptop in front of me and showed me Nic Cage going mad, which has got to be the funniest thing on YouTube. He's so courageous.

I live on a ranch that's larger than Manhattan. That's a weird circumstance.

A lot of old guys in movies are like cowboys -- they talk like cowboys and they dress like cowboys.

I have two children and they're young yet but all of the children that I know really inspire me.

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

Again, in Wag the Dog, war has to be declared by an act of congress. But if you go to war, you don't have to declare war. You're just at war and we did that, which is not legal.

If you look up the definition of news in the dictionary, it isn't what you watch on TV.

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

The Secret Service is a strange group. They don't really have a leader. It's not set up like a military. Each one is supposed to be able to act like a leader when something comes up.

Most films made about the future acquiesce toward death, and I don't want to be told how to define my future.

My father was raised in the mountains of New Mexico, and he picked cotton for a dollar a day. He was working for the family from the time he was 7.

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 don't think of my life as a cliche, but I'm a cliche eccentric. Complete with a strange name -- I mean, who's named Val? How many Vals do you know? I mean, really?

Hollywood's like a warehouse. It's just a place that you go. What's interesting in the warehouse has to do with the creative people.

Why do women get paid less money? It doesn't make any sense.

Mark Twain is as big as America. He really is.

Postman is a media analyst and his theory is that television doesn't influence our culture, but that it is our culture and the presidency and anything that relies on television.

I am not an American; I am the American.

One out of 100 citizens of the U.S. is going to prison, and it's not that the system is making criminals, it's that it's making criminals better criminals. We're breeding them like rats and it has to change.

Jim Thompson understood something about the serial killer before the psychology caught up to it, which is that they are detached to it and they do want to get caught.

My perception is that I've never done anything but work really hard.

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.

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.

It's the first time that I've ever had an art show based on a film, but it's a photography collage.

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.

Mark Twain created a new type of literature and not a lot of people can say that. Not a lot of people can say they're absolutely original and completely self-made.

Life is precious, and when someone dies it's an opportunity to realise how precious it is. My brother drowned when I was 17. He was 15. I think I grew from that. My father didn't. It really crushed him.

We take what's shown on television as the truth, and it isn't. News isn't even the truth on television. If you look up the definition of what news is, it isn't that what we're watching on the new -- it's entertainment.

Mark Twain had a way of telling stories that shifts your consciousness away from labels.

Youth is seen as everything. You don't know anything when you're young. It's great being older, just having a more balanced perspective. I wake up and realise that what seemed to be important last year no longer is. I'm increasingly grateful for every day.

I don't watch television, but I saw 'The Office' by accident. I thought it was so sophisticated, the Victorian love story, and so bold. We'd do anything, all of us, to not work in that environment, and then I'm sitting there watching hours of it.

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

There was such a relationship between the buffalo and the American Indian -- the Indians would eat them, live inside their pelts, use every part of the body. There was almost no separation between the people and the animals.

Partly because the town is just finicky, there are strange Catch 22 clauses in the consciousness of this community and one of them was that you, I found out, you can't do a comedy unless you've just done a comedy.

Well I sure had been looking for a comedy for years without any success.

I sang the songs in 'The Doors'.

I respect people who can do both careers, like Will Smith and a couple of other people who have done it, but I just don't know when they sleep.

News is something that happens that matters to you, which is not most of what we watch on television.

I'm very wary of news on television.

I've been very fortunate and met the guys that have become, basically, philosophers and have a kind of sensibility about life that's very precious.

There's nothing good about divorce.

It's a really weird thing, modern divorce. I found out I was getting divorced on television. That was kind of weird.

It's the persona that makes you a leading actor. A leading actor has something extra that's fun to watch. But it isn't usually about acting.

I'm a character actor, but I look like a leading man.

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