Penn: "Anger can be a problem, but it has tremendous potential, too. It's just figuring out what to do with it."

Penn: "You're always having to live more to fuel something new. It's an obligation to yourself and to the audience. The personal baggage that comes with being a known actor just adds to that struggle."

Penn: "Oh, I'm a big-mouth. I said a lot of things."

Penn: "Selling a movie feels like a hustle to every bone in my body. Many actors have careers dominated by modeling. They're all over the place. It turns me off. People who are good at what they do ought to practice something bigger."

Penn: "There's a lot of mediocrity being celebrated, and a lot of wonderful stuff being ignored or discouraged."

Penn: "There is no shame in my saying that we all want to be loved by someone. As I look back over my life in romance, I don't feel I've ever had that."

Penn: "That on a romantic level, if you feel it about somebody and it's pure, it means that they do too."

Penn: "I had a house burn down once, and everything in life burned, except my family, and it was so liberating. I didn't have a bad moment about it. It sort of reinvigorated my interest in a lot of things."

Penn: "On any movie I'm involved with, I say what I think."

Penn: "Putting something in a movie because it's in the news doesn't make it political to me. If you're not going outside the same old, same old, if you're not pushing the envelope, then you're not doing anything. A good movie is a political thing."

Penn: "I choose movies that I think will speak to what's important."

Penn: "When I buy a Nikon camera, I have no tolerance for the instructions. I'm ready to make some mistakes using it and get some bad pictures back until I've figured it out for myself."

Penn: "I think life's an irrational obsession."

Penn: "When you act in a film, you're inevitably surrounded by people you didn't choose, right down to the set painter. I like being able to pick the family I'm waking up to in the morning that's going to make this group effort to tell a story that applies to what's interesting to me at that stage in my life."

Penn: "I like to believe that love is a reciprocal thing, that it can't really be felt, truly, by one."

Penn: "A lot of critics sometimes get into analyzing the way actors direct versus non-actors directing. And they really always miss it. It's one of those things where, by not being practitioners, they just came up with something that made sense to them."

Penn: "I think we all have light and dark inside us."

Penn: "The major studios are by and large banks, and they give you what is by and large a loan to make a movie. Like banks, they want their money back plus."

Penn: "I live in the energy and rhythm of the character. To some degree, that's true of every actor I've worked with."

Penn: "Well, look at all of these summer blockbusters. You can't help but laugh a little, because you've already seen a lot of these movies 482 times."

Penn: "I just want real creative freedom without worrying about, you know, car payments."

Penn: "Whatever one considers art to be, there is in many people a hunger to express themselves creatively and to feel authentic in doing that."

Penn: "There is a strength of character in the people who have, by and large, never experienced comfort."

Penn: "I cannot tell you that I ever fell in love with the theater as an audience. I fell in love with the theater as an actor for a period of time, but I have struggled as an audience, and I struggle more now than then. I was always a movie guy."

Penn: "I choose movies that I think will speak to what's important."

Penn: "I don't consider myself specifically political, you know? I think of working as an actor as being a human thing. The concerns I have that fall into politics are human concerns."