I still work out most days. When I do it, I go full blast five or six days a week, two to three hours a day. I enjoy it. It's therapeutic for me.
It was either therapy or die.
I had achieved so much success in my career and then had this spectacular fall from grace that left me unemployed and living in a town, Los Angeles, that is built on envy. Once you fall, people don't really root for you to come back again. I'd go to restaurants where I always had the best table and half the time they wouldn't even let me pay. And then when I stopped making movies, the same places wouldn't even give me a lousy table, never mind the best one!
I never look backwards. I have always been an athlete. I boxed before I acted.
Wrestlers are all pretty busted-up by the ends of their careers.
I had some things I had to fix. It took me 14 years to do it. But it was never really fun back in the day to work with directors who were a lot older and were like authoritarian and talking to you like that.
I thought my talent would transcend my outspokenness. I was wrong.
I wanted to change my name to Romeo Florentino. Romeo Florentino - that's a good fighter's name.
All I am hoping for is to be able to work-I think my best work is still ahead of me-I think all that I have been through in the last several years have only made me a better, more interesting actor.
Hey, baby, nobody suffers like the poor.
A reputation is really hard to live down.
Hollywood's famous for putting you in a box.
[The tension] between the Christians and Muslims goes back to the Crusades, doesn't it? It's too easy to blame everything on one guy. These are unpredictable, dangerous times, and I don't think that anyone really knows quite what to do.
A couple of guys won Academy Awards for the things that I turned down. Today, after coming to terms with everything, after being in therapy for a long time-there are areas where I will compromise.
Women are much stronger than men. When a woman says enough is enough, which means enough is enough. Man will always lie at her feet in the hope of return. I was lying. And somehow happy.
I trained like an animal, but the thing is focus and concentration. When the bell rings it's like when the little red light goes on over the camera. And I can usually nail my lines on the first or second take because I'm right there.
When I was like 12 or 13,Muhammad Ali gave me a pair of his trunks that were white satin with gold stripes. They were full of blood, and my mother threw them away. I think it's the first time I ever cursed at my mother.
I started having some memory-loss issues. I took a neurological exam, and they said, "Well, you should stop fighting now." And I kept begging them for one more fight, one more fight, and the doctor said to me, "How much are they going to pay you?" I was supposed to fight three more times, and one would have been for a cruiser belt. So I said, "I just need to fight three more times." He said, "Listen, you can't even get hit in the head one more time, your neuro is so bad."
I've been with a lot of women, but who's counting? It's nothing I'm proud of. It's a physical need. Sometimes afterwards I just want to blow my brains out, it's so meaningless.
Wrestling and boxing is like Ping-Pong and rugby. There's no connection.
Bounty hunters these days - because everything is so sophisticated with computers and surveillance, it doesn't have to be a one-man-army-type guy who goes in and kicks a door down.
I was very ashamed of seeing a therapist because I thought only crazy people went, and then, after about nine years, I asked him, 'Well, was I really crazy?' And he nodded and said, 'You were but not any more.'
I'm the worst surfer in California. My balance is off from boxing.
I couldn't direct traffic. It's hard enough just acting.
I get a call, and it's Howard Bingham, and he's got the champ on the line.Muhammad Ali didn't remember me from being a kid, but he was going, "Yeah, you're in bed, and you want your mama with you . . ." It really helped so much. He spent 15 or 20 minutes on the phone with me. That's a memory that I'll always cherish.
I'm an old broken down piece of meat and I deserve to be all alone . . .
Boxers are very isolated - or isolated within their own camps.
Evan Rachel Wood is the best actress I've ever worked with, hands down.
Where I come from, being a hard man is being able to take a good beating and then get back up again and carry on fighting.
I always knew I'd accomplish something very special - like robbing a bank perhaps.
People ask me about that all the time. They say, "Did you ever think of directing?" And I say, "It's completely out of the question."
It's always been the case that you have the really rich, and the really poor. But hey, look, all the great empires have their periods where they rule the world, and then they crumble.
Comeback is a good word, man.
I don't mind getting punched in the nose by a guy standing in front of me. It's getting stabbed in the back that I can't handle.
People are always afraid of the truth.
I grew up in a gym in Miami, the one where Muhammad Ali trained. I had 142 amateur fights and lost three.
Some of your worst gangsters are guys who were very low-key.
I probably did a dozen plays, like Off-Off-Broadway stuff.
I think the first year and a half that I was in New York I was having trouble just living somewhere. Back in them days the city was a lot different than it is now.
All that prosthetic makeup drains you. By the time it's lunch, you're done.
Years ago I realized that maybe I made mistake, politically, when I turned a lot of that stuff down. I would go off to obscure places and make movies that six people went to see.
I don't care what Tom Cruise says about therapy.
I did think for many, many years that because of my ability I could beat the system. And I was wrong.
A lot of the stuff I am now seeing is edgy, raw kinda material.
I had a lot of anger inside me and that came out at times that were not particularly advantageous to me career-wise.
I had gotten injured during the boxing, and I was supposed to take several months off because I'd had a couple of concussions, and so I sort of just left the boxing and got into the acting by accident.
I spent a lot of years trying to beat the system and, in the end, the system kicked my behind good.
I have so many boxing gloves around my house that I would get them confused with other gloves.
I was very immature when I was young, and for me there was no balance. Everything was just all or nothing.
In boxing, you don't know what's going to happen. In wrestling, it's already prearranged.
It's the formulaic studio movies the make money, and when they do, the actors in them are automatically movie stars.
I come from a violent background. So I became hard. I realised that I had made myself that way to deal with a feeling of abandonment and shame.
Sometimes, when a man is alone, that's all you got is your dog.
My dogs are more important than my family.
I had a bonding problem when I went off and boxed for five years. I was over in Europe and Asia fighting because I wanted to do something different; I was tired of acting. But the thing is, when I was done doing that, I couldn't get a job.
I spent so long studying really hard to become a fine actor, but threw it all away because I got the adulation and the fame so easily
I never knew my father, and I'd hate to repeat that kind of cycle with my own children, because I'd also want to be there for them no matter what.
Usually if you read a screenplay, no matter who's writing it, the bad guy is always written as a one-dimensional bad guy.
Julian Schnabel painted a picture that he dedicated to my character in Rumble Fish. It was called The Motorcycle Boy. I remember when he brought it over to me at the Mayflower Hotel [in New York] years ago. This is when you and I knew each other.
A lot of those who let you down are those who seemed the closest to you.
The two sports are as different as Ping-Pong and rugby. In boxing, you don’t know what’s going to happen. In wrestling, it’s already prearranged. But the thing I didn’t know about wrestling is that you really get hurt. Because, you know, you’re wrestling in front of a live audience, and you end up doing things like jumps or slams, and 40 percent of the time you don’t land right.
I behaved worse than anybody for 15 years, and you have to pay the price for that. I used to blame other people, then therapy made me realise I had to change.
When I did Sean Penn’s movie, I think I was living in, like, a $500-a-month room, and someone called me up or bumped into me and asked me if I’d come up to work for a day. That sort of got me going a little bit. But it wasn’t until Sin City [2005] that I kind of got back into the game.
Being out of work for 13 to 15 years is no walk in the park.
I tried to change my name for the fights, but the only way they could pay me money was if I used my own name. I wanted to change my name to, like, Romeo something-or-other, and they said, "No, we can't do that. We've got to use Mickey Rourke." Because they paid me a lot of money to go over to Europe and Asia to fight.
Since I knew wrestling was all choreographed, I thought, Oh, they don't get hurt at all. But I walked away with a renewed respect for the sport. Because I was very ignorant before - I knew nothing about it.
In order to understand the stock market we have to realize that, like anything enormous and inert, it's fundamentally stable, and, like anything emotion-driven, it's volatile as hell. Got that? Me neither.
Acting was never my first choice as a profession, but I came to terms with it when I decided I better buckle down and be the best I can be at it.
I started to shortcircuit because I had high aspirations for the film. I never told anybody that.
By the end of the shoot [of Wrestler], my trainer was pushing me up three flights of stairs to my house and holding my arm like I was an old cripple. I had three MRIs in the first two months of working on the film. I felt like it really was over by the time we started shooting the movie.
Actors should shut up about politics. They tend to be ill-informed finger-pointers who just cosy up to some flavour of-the-month liberal.
I have a really good relationship with a lot of designers. I like Gaultier, Billionaire and Cavalli.
Change for me was really hard because I had built myself up to be a certain kind of man my whole life, as men are where I come from. I thought I got to handle things different that's gonna make me feel like a real pussy. For me it was hard to turn the other cheek. Even though it's a stronger choice. It was very hard to make the change, but I had to in order to survive. Otherwise they would have won.
If you look closely at some scenes in Diner, my eyes look like Dracula's.
