George Clooney

In the '60s, when I was growing up, one of the great elements of American culture was the protest song. There were songs about the civil rights movement, the women's rights movement, the antiwar movement. It wasn't just Bob Dylan, it was everybody at the time.

There is something very unsettling about being with someone when they die. People say it's peaceful. It's not peaceful. It's the most personal thing you can do, is die, and you feel almost like you're invading someone's most personal moment by being there.

My father was and is a great journalist. Thirty years ago, I was studying broadcasting in college, and the problem was I wasn't nearly as good as my father. I wasn't as quick or as smart as my old man, and I realized it would be a long time before I was ever going to be, and I decided to do something else.

I've been my most happy and my most unhappy in relationships. I have family and friends and people I care very much about. I've got a really, really, really good life.

I do know something about the news world. I was sitting on the floors of newsrooms since I was seven years old, and I've been around them my whole life. I understand that someone looks at a story with famous people in it, and you want to put it out.

The simple truth is that everyone has an opinion, everyone has the right to voice it, and they should if they want to.

I had to stop going to auditions thinking, 'Oh, I hope they like me.' I had to go in thinking I was the answer to their problem.

I'd think,'In a relationship, we should never have his kind of fight.' Then, instead of figuring out how to make it work, I looked for a way to get out of it. The truth is, you shouldn't be married if your that kind of person.

I enjoy living in a nice house and having a nice life. So I do two or three commercials overseas a year to sort of fill in, because they pay pretty well.

I've been lucky enough to do a few films that will last longer than an opening weekend and those films are the ones I'm proud of.

As you get older and ease your way into being a character actor you have to be comfortable with where you are in life and career, and I'm very comfortable with what I'm doing - working on projects I'm proud of.

The people I've respected most in the industry over the years - Paul Newman, for instance. I just loved the way he handled growing old on-screen. It's understanding that you're now basically a character actor. Which is fine, but you have to pay attention to it.

Directors are the captains of the ship, and it's your job as the lead actor to make sure that the rest of the cast understand that by doing whatever he says.

I watch 'Batman & Robin' from time to time. It's the worst movie I ever made, so it's a good lesson in humility.

Growing old on screen is not for the faint of heart.

There's a certain cruelty to being on a big screen as your eyelids start to sag and your hair falls out and turns gray that you either have to be able to handle or not. What you can't do is try to force yourself into roles that you could have played or would have played ten years earlier.

I just think there are a lot of celebrities who don't feel that they have a voice. A lot of actors come from a place of fear, and that's just a general statement about actors. You're terrified the casting director won't like you, you're terrified the producer won't like you, you're terrified the director won't like you, and on and on.

The idea that every time you do a film you're supposed to be tortured confuses me. I mean, guys who say, 'Oh, it's really tough, my character is really suffering' -come on. For us, even in the rotten ones we've had a good time. I don't think you have to suffer.

My parents were disappointed I didn't finish college, and they were really upset when I went to Hollywood to become an actor. I was a big disappointment to them.

If you're famous, I don't - for the life of me - I don't understand why any famous person would ever be on Twitter.

I find that as you get older, you start to simplify things in general.

Shutting down the government is not how you make government work.

I think the reason why a lot of young people are such screw ups... is oftentimes they didn't have the luxury I had of forming important relationships and opinions and life experiences before having success.

I grew up in the world of bad television, on my dad's sets and then as a young schmuck on dating shows and so on.

I'd think, 'In a relationship, we should never have his kind of fight.' Then, instead of figuring out how to make it work, I looked for a way to get out of it. The truth is, you shouldn't be married if your that kind of person.

Anytime there's an actual grassroots movement that isn't funded by people trying to create a grassroots movement, I find that interesting.

I'm not smart enough and I don't know enough about what's going on.

I've walked with very famous people down red carpets over to the crowd of thousands of people, and you'll reach out to shake their hand and they've got a camera in their hand. And they don't even get their hand out, because they're recording the whole time.

The only failure is not to try.

'Ides of March' I did for scale - scale as a director, scale as an actor, scale as a writer.

Who would name their kid Jack with the last words 'off' at the end of the last name? No wonder that guy is screwed up.

In doing the screenplay for 'Good Night, and Good Luck,' the most important thing for me was to constantly go back to wherever the opposition would argue. So I had to keep reading all the books and articles about why McCarthy is such a good guy.

For me, the definition of a patriot is someone who is willing to constantly question the government; that's what separates us from other countries.

I can't give you 150 takes. I can't even give you 30 different ways of doing it! I don't have the talent or the range for it.

Having 'Oscar winner' on your tombstone is a great thing.

I enjoy going on motorcycle trips and stopping in small towns and enjoying drinks with the locals.

I love children and I get along with them great. It's just that I believe if you're going to be a parent, there has to be something inside you that says, 'I want a family.' I don't feel that sense of urgency.

After a while, you just want transportation, and things like cool cars or motorcycles are all about getting attention. I get all the attention I could ever need, so I kind of like being in a minivan and people not paying so much attention to me.

I did a lot of terrible TV shows and was really terrible in them, and I've done terrible films I was terrible in, but nobody really noticed.

If people see me having dinner with a beautiful woman, they immediately believe that I'm having a love affair with her. Of course that's rubbish. I'm not a playboy!

Hosting is work. It means you don't get to go up to your room and disappear and take a nap. Like everybody else does after lunch. I'm talking about hosting, not hosting a dinner party, but hosting people staying in your home.

I'm kind of comfortable with getting older because it's better than the other option, which is being dead. So I'll take getting older.

You don't want to try to look younger, because you'll look wrong. You dye your hair, you look wrong. You wear a bad toupee, you look wrong. You wear makeup to hide things, you get your eyes done, you look wrong.

I don't believe in happy endings, but I do believe in happy travels, because ultimately, you die at a very young age, or you live long enough to watch your friends die. It's a mean thing, life.

Directing is much more satisfying to me than acting.

When you're young you believe it when people tell you how good you are. And that's the danger, you inhale. Everyone will tell you you're a genius, which you are not, and if you understand that, you win.

The government itself is running exactly like the Sopranos and they sit back and they make deals. And they say okay, 'I'm going do this: France, you're getting the pipelines.'

Hollywood still makes things. We still export a couple billion dollars' worth of product overseas. Original, new product. Some people might not agree that it's original or new, but basically it is.

I don't tweet, I don't go on Facebook. I think there's too much information about all of us out there. I'm liking the idea of privacy more and more.

People know everything about everybody now.

On an awards-show day, I can play basketball, go in, take a shower and put on a tux - it takes me three minutes to put on a tux - and be out the door in 15 minutes.

I'm the flavor of the month.

I'm a Method actor. I spent years training for the drinking and carousing I had to do in this film.

I think you should automatically donate your organs because that would turn the balance of organ donation in a huge way. I would donate whatever anybody would take, and I'd probably do the cremation bit.

I don't care. Charlton Heston is the head of the National Rifle Association. He deserves whatever anyone says about him.

There is a strange pecking order among actors. Theater actors look down on film actors, who look down on TV actors. Thank God for reality shows, or we wouldn't have anybody to look down on.

My father ran for Congress in 2004, and I got a sense that there is no way to achieve much success without a certain amount of compromise.

The loneliest you will get is in the most public of arenas: You will go to a place and end up in the smallest compartment possible, because it's a distraction to everybody, and you end up not getting to enjoy it like everyone else.

I have a real interest in pushing some of the limits of things that studios don't want to make.

My grandparents back in Kentucky owned a tobacco farm. So, to make money in the summer, we could cut and chop and top and house and strip the tobacco.

I don't go on that many dates, because the truth is, anytime you go out in public with a girl when you're well-known, there are pictures of you everywhere, and it's like you're a thing.

You can't legislate good taste.

Failures are infinitely more instructive than successes.

An acting career usually has about a shelf life of ten years before people get sick of seeing you. It's a good thing to have a job to fall back on and I really do enjoy directing.

When you first start out as an actor, you're just looking for a good part. As time goes on, if you're being held responsible for the movies themselves, you're looking for a good script all around.

You have only a short period of time in your life to make your mark, and I'm there now.

On Christmas morning, before we could open our Christmas presents, we would go to this stranger's home and bring them presents. I remember helping clean the house up and putting up a tree. My father believed that you have a responsibility to look after everyone else.

It's incredibly unfair. You don't see a lot of 60-year-old women with 20-year-old men onscreen.

I was watching 'Up In The Air' and I thought, 'Jesus, who's the old gray-haired guy?' And it was me. I never wear makeup for movies and now it's starting to show.

I don't like to share my personal life... it wouldn't be personal if I shared it.

Over the years, over the history of our country, liberals have stood on many of the right sides of the issues.

I was very lucky to get well known much later in life. You need to have flopped quite a few times to get a sense of how little any of it has to do with you.

It's very easy for people to be critical of President Obama's first term, but let's face it, he didn't exactly inherit the country in the best shape.

I like owning dirt. You know, I spent a lot of time broke when I moved to California. So deep in my soul is still this idea of being unemployed. To me, owning land means you could sell it at some point and have money.

Republicans are good at standing by their candidate.

I had a Tesla. I was one of the first cats with a Tesla. But I'm telling you, I've been on the side of the road a while in that thing.

I'm only two years older than Brad Pitt, but I look a lot older, which used to greatly frustrate me. It doesn't anymore. I don't have to fit into that category and get trounced by Tom Cruise and Brad.

I do happen to have a good life... But I also like to work. I feel like I got the brass ring and I got very lucky in this.

I think it's the most responsible thing you can do, to have kids. It's not something to be taken lightly. I don't have that gene that people have to replicate.

I rarely tell anybody what they should be doing with their life.

The hardest thing is trying not to correct everything on the Internet. It'd be night and day - wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. So you just have to say, 'All right, I'll take it, bring it on.'

I've certainly done some turkeys along the way and made some dumb choices in my career, mostly early on. I'm one of the lucky ones who got to make a lot of mistakes very early when no one was paying attention.

There is a strange pecking order among actors. Theatre actors look down on film actors, who look down on TV actors. Thank God for reality shows, or we wouldn't have anybody to look down on.

I probably wouldn't be a good spokesman for an electric car, because I'll still get on a private jet, and one flight on a private jet undoes all my electric-car good deeds.

I'm certainly the last person to give advice on, well, anything.

I'm the old-fashioned type who prefers to meet a woman in a more normal setting. I don't like to feel that I'm being hunted down. I've always liked to do my own hunting when it comes to meeting women.

I think people in Italy live their lives better than we do. It's an older country, and they've learned to celebrate dinner and lunch, whereas we sort of eat as quickly as we can to get through it.

I certainly direct with confidence even if I'm not confident. I learned early on as an actor that confidence can be faked, and it's not always a terrible thing to do. A lot of times if people feel you're confident, then they're confident.

I love my grey hair and wrinkles. I love the fact that my face has more of an edge and more character than it did when I was in my twenties and thirties. No Botox for me.

Honestly, as you can imagine, it really isn't all that fun directing yourself, running back and forth to the monitors to see if you're terrible or not.

They say I was a bad Batman, that it was my fault, that I buried the franchise. But the truth is, it was a big project. I was pretty intimidated in that world. I did the best I could in the situation I was given.

You have to remember that in the microcosm of Cincinnati, Ohio, through northern Kentucky, my father was a big star, still is. So that made my sister and me really visible. Everybody knew us, talked about us.

Without question, I wake every night five times.

I'm really white trash.

After doing One Fine Day and playing a pediatrician on ER, I'll never have kids. I'm going to have a vasectomy.

I get asked a lot about getting into politics. I say, 'Take a look at politics. You tell me what seems appealing about that.'

Im kind of comfortable with getting older because its better than the other option which is being dead. So Ill take getting older.

I go on YouTube when somebody says to look something up.

You get better as an actor over time if you're growing. Like singers.

I was in a bar and I said to a friend, 'You know, we've become those 40-year-old guys we used to look at and say, 'Isn't it sad?'