Quotes By Michael Caine

I regard myself as someone who is retired but who occasionally goes out to work. In fact, I'm offered so much good stuff that it's not so occasional.

I feel like 35. At 35 you're old enough to know something and young enough to look forward to what you can do with the knowledge. So I stayed at 35!

If you think you're going to be up for an Oscar, you schedule your moviemaking.

I see myself as 38, but you don't notice it.

I am a great admirer of other actors, but I never compete with other actors. I always compete with what I did last, and I'm my own most vicious critic. So I'm always trying to do it better.

When you reach the top, that's when the climb begins.

January is the garbage can of movies in America, directly after all the Oscar contenders have been out.

I'm forever testing myself. As a person and as an actor, I have no sense of competition.

Hollywood is a cross between a health farm, a recreation center and an insane asylum. It's a company town, and I happen to like the company!

If you're a movie actor, you're on your own - you cannot control the stage. The director controls it.

Anyone can write. But comedy, you've got to do some writing. You get one comedy script to every 20 dramas.

I read books like mad, but I am careful to to let anything I read influence me.

In the sixties, everyone you knew became famous. My flatmate was Terence Stamp. My barber was Vidal Sassoon. David Hockney did the menu in a restaurant I went to. I didn't know anyone unknown who didn't become famous.

To disappear your complete self into a character is quite difficult. I've tried it 85 times, and I've succeeded two or three times.

The first actor I ever saw was The Lone Ranger. I thought, That's what I want to do.

I don't work very much, and I just sit here waiting for a script that I can't refuse - and I'm not talking about money.

Obsession is a young man's game, and my only excuse is that I never grew old.

My problem was that I was blond. There were no heroes with blond hair. Robert Taylor and Henry Fonda, they all had dark hair. The only one I found was Van Johnson, who wasn't too cool. He was a nice, homely American boy. So I created my own image. It worked.

I prefer to remake flops. Dirty Rotten Scoundrels was a remake of a flop, and The Quiet American is a remake of a flop.

As an actor, I'll play anything.

I started with the firm conviction that when I came to the end, I wanted to be regretting the things that I had done, not the things I hadn't.

The standing ovation threw me... to be held in such regard in a town so full of talent is quite something.

I am in so many movies that are on TV at 2:00 a.m. that people think I am dead.

English is clipped in speech. Texas is exactly the opposite.

If you go away on location for three months and your wife stays at home, you've made a whole new load of friends and she's made a whole new load of friends and you get home and you're kind of strangers.

Movie acting is about covering the machinery. Stage acting is about exposing the machinery. In cinema, you should think the actor is playing himself, if he's that good. It looks very easy. It should. But it's not, I assure you.

There's quite a lot of bad stuff written about me. My wife even says a lot of bad stuff about me. But she is wonderful.

I'm the audience's representative on earth.

I'll always be there because I'm a skilled professional actor. Whether or not I've any talent is beside the point.

Be like a duck. Calm on the surface, but always paddling like the dickens underneath.