Quotes

[on why he won't marry Goldie Hawn] If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

I seem to have a knack for picking movies that go on to be cult favorites.

If it hadn't been for video cassette, I may not have had a career at all.

[on the fight scene with Ox Baker from Escape from New York (1981)] I remember Dick Warlock helped set up the fight and he came out with this big purple lump on the side of his head, and all he said to me was "Keep your head down and be careful, man.".

I was brought up as a Republican. But when I realized that at the end of the day there wasn't much difference between a Democrat and Republican, I became a libertarian.

To go on about acting as art is ridiculous. If it is an art, then it's a very low form. You don't have to be gifted just to hit a mark and say a line. And as far as I'm concerned, hitting my marks and knowing my lines is 90% of the job. I'm always criticized for talking like that. Maybe the reason I do it is that I never got the chance to develop a real desire to act. I was acting by the time I was nine so it seemed like a natural thing to do. Anyone who finds acting difficult just shouldn't be doing it.

You know, when Escape from New York (1981) first came out, a lot of people said, 'I don't quite understand this movie ... is this some kind of comment that, like, New York is a prison?' and years later a lot of people are saying, 'You know, New York is looking a lot like that movie.' In Escape from L.A. (1996), it's a story about a guy who just wants a cigarette. He just wants a cigarette! Everybody laughed back then because there was no red meat, no cigarettes in the movie. Well, look around! It's happening! You can barely smoke a cigarette anymore and although I quit smoking six months ago, the anti-smoking laws are enough to make me want to smoke!

My generation couldn't stand me and I couldn't stand them. In high school I was to the right of being straight. I believed in the work ethic, making money, and they all had this beef with the nation. Vietnam disappointed me because we didn't win.

(1996) For me there's never been a woman more beautiful than Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca (1942).

(1996, on smoking marijuana) I never did, not until I was 32. I still don't understand the reason for smoking dope if you're not going to have sex. To me, drugs have no appeal other than sex.

(1996) Bull Durham (1988) is tough to talk about. (Director) Ronnie [Ron Shelton] and I both lived that life, there were a lot of things in there that were derivative of what had happened to me. I was surprised that Ronnie [did] it with somebody else. I went to Europe on a vacation, having said the script was great, and I came back to discover Kevin [Kevin Costner] was doing it. Ronnie got a better deal. So I pulled a practical joke on him that wiped the slate clean for me. I was working on Winter People (1989) about 60 miles from where he was doing Bull Durham (1988). I got on the phone, pretended to be [production chief] Mike Medavoy, ordered that Ronnie be pulled off the set, and I told him that the dailies were shit, the movie was shit and Costner was not working, "Here's what we're going to do",' I told him. "Kurt Russell's 60 miles north of you finishing Winter People (1989) tonight. He will be on the set Monday morning". There was this long pause until Ronnie realized who he was really talking to, and then he said, "You son of a bitch!" I had him going for a few minutes, though.

(1996) The only time in my entire life as an actor when I felt I didn't know what I was doing was on Tango & Cash (1989), when I had to dress up as a woman. It's not an acting chore I'd care to do again. I looked like a really ugly version of my mother, who happens to be beautiful. I don't get transvestism.

(1996) When I read Executive Decision (1996), it was a real page-turner. I read scripts for the movies more than I do for the characters. I've read lots of characters I'd like to play, but I didn't enjoy the movie itself that much. I liked the fun of Executive Decision (1996), you know, I feel when an audience sees my name attached to a film, they think it'll probably be a pretty good movie. The movies I do, if we make them well, will be fun to watch. They may not be the best movie of the year, and I may not be your favorite actor, but people come up to me all the time and say, "I like the movies you do".

(1996) It would be fun to have enough money to have a small restaurant where you could have your eclectic group of friends come in and get a good meal and be able to scream and holler, about politics, about anything-and you could be able to afford to lose $200,000 a year on it and it wouldn't make a difference. I'd like to have a jet airplane that I could fly, which would get me back and forth to Aspen inside of two hours, so that Aspen could become a weekend place. I'd like to have enough money to be able to afford some things for my family that I know they could use. Then, too, you know, certain humanitarian things-like, financing a school which could make a difference.

(1996, on his passion for hunting and where that started) My grandfather owned a hotel along Kennebago Lake in Maine. It had 31 log cabins and was built in 1887. I grew up watching all the guys going out in snowshoes while I played with my sister in the yard, and they'd come back with a deer. And then I got old enough to go with them. I grew up thinking that was the way to live. You could feed yourself, you could have corn in your garden, you could stock things in a barn, you didn't need anybody to do anything. And my grandparents were doing that. My grandfather was a phenomenal shot. And I watched my dad shoot deer, impossible shots when I could barely even see the deer. Goldie's a great game cook. We have a party every New Year's Day in Old Snowmass where everybody just watches the football games and they have Goldie's elk stew. We cook as much of the stuff as we can and finish it every time. And she enjoys that.

(1996) I am like Thomas Jefferson or Benjamin Franklin. I love life. I have a comic outlook, I laugh at myself harder than at anybody else. I get extremely vociferous about things I don't believe in, but I'm in the moment. Benjamin Franklin loved life, he wasn't a negative person. And I do sense that I'm being more perceived like that now.

(1996, on being part of the Hollywood community) At times I take great pride in it. But most of the time I'm completely ashamed of it, especially on the night of the Academy Awards. It's the one night of the year where I just want to crawl in a hole and hide. It's a bit like standing shoulder-to-shoulder with assholes. Mike Nichols and I were talking about politics once and he said, "The thing is, you can't stand shoulder-to-shoulder with assholes." And he's right. I can't. What's interesting about Oscar night is it's a joke-it's about how bad everything is. Everybody knows that that's the night to applaud Hollywood in all its horror. And yet...There's no other business that can create such enjoyment of life as this business. I love being part of that. Actors have changed my life at times. When people get to know me, I can't tell you how many times they come up to me and say, "You're nothing like what I've read about." I think people feel me more than they hear me. I've read interviews I've done and it's exactly what I've said but it's not what I was saying. I have an acerbic, sardonic sense of humor. I'm being facetious 90 percent of the time, but then 10 percent of the time I'm not. So unless I was to qualify everything I say, I'm not going to be understood.

It's easy to listen to actors talk about integrity, but I think the truth is, if you're going to make your living as an actor, your integrity is what you run into, it's not what you run with. If you went with that - and no actor ever has - you'd never work.

I remember one time being told - I never read it - that I had been referred to as 'Disney's little Nazi'. I was just like, wow. You either continue to work, or it hurts you enough that you quit. You're always able to just walk away - nobody's twisting your arm to stay in this business.

[on The Expendables (2010)] I mean, I'm glad Sly's done well with this. He's a great person. The fellas all seem to have a good time. I've never seen any of them. It's not a beat I get. It's like looking backwards to me.

I'd like those people who have, in my mind, the intellectual - the faux intellectual - audacity to question them (the rig workers), I would love to put them there. If I could play God I'd love to say to them, here, trade places. You go through what you have to go through to survive - and now I'm going to criticize you. And then I'd just say, "Man, do you kind of feel differently about it now?"

You have criminals doing horrible things and you have cops trying to stop them. The cops have been hired by society to do that, but society hired the cops within guidelines and what many cops find out is that they can't always stop criminals within these guidelines. So, if you hold hard and fast to the rules, the crime rate goes through the roof; once you relax the guidelines, and if you're the individual cop that's going to do that, you bring crime down but you have society on your back for breaking the rules. It's a ball that goes back and forth.

I grew up in the world of baseball not the world of Hollywood.

Let's say you're the parent of a kid who's getting bullied at school. Your kid is getting punched around and he comes home and tells you about it, and your response is to say to your kid, "Now, are you sure you haven't done something to make him mad? Are you sure you didn't do anything to anger him?" and you never give the kid any credence as far as, "I believe you and I believe the bully. He apparently doesn't care for you, and you're going to have to turn around and face that bully." At least that's one argument to have, isn't it?

[about Escape from L.A. (1996)] The incorrect take on the president is that he's a right wing president, Christian coalition guy. I preferred my original thought which was that he was politically correct - it's a strange mix of political bedfellows. If you take a just left of center president who happens to be politically smart enough to hook up with the Christian coalition, he would have a pretty broad political base... Let's take that guy and let's give him a vision of a catastrophe in Los Angeles, a religious vision, which he really has. He has that vision and it comes true, bang. Not only does he think he's right, everybody in the United States thinks he's right, so they make him king for a day, bang. Well in his dictatorship, which that statement is a right wing type statement but it's not a right wing guy, it's a guy who says, I'm gonna do what's good for you. Smoking's not good for you so you're not gonna do that. I'm gonna do what's good for you. Wearing fur is not appreciated by a lot of people so we're not gonna allow that. Red meat is eventually going to get you, so I'm gonna help you out. So he takes it from the left side of the scale.

It's like television has finally gotten its tentacles completely and totally into the process of storytelling on a motion picture level. The big movies now for the most part are ones you can do six, seven, eight, nine of. It's just television series at the movie theaters. Which is really where a lot of the movie business began, years and years ago, with Saturday morning serials.

The whole point of it is freedom as long as I don't step on your toes. Well, if I run your kid over when I'm high on drugs, I've stepped on your toes a little bit. We're gonna watch you hang slow and painful, babe. That's the way it's going to be.

They call themselves liberal; I call them completely confined human beings.

When I did the light comedies at Disney, that was quite a different thing for me to be doing because when I first went there the character that I played was a the son of an alcoholic and he was very ashamed of it. The kid had real problems, but he was a tough kid that wanted to be a part of something. The other thing I remember doing with him at that age was Willie and the Yank and I was a confederate soldier at the age of 15, shooting people! Riding horses with guns! It was very cool.

I have a secret admiration for insurance salesmen, doormen, taxi drivers, guys working on the Alaska pipeline...many hundreds of jobs where they work. There's lots of jobs now in the world where we don't work, we push a button. I don't work. I've never worked. I take great pride in the fact that I played baseball, I drove race cars, I drove racing boats, I flew airplanes and I acted. None of those things are work. Doing what you want to do, that's not work.

We live in a pop culture time which I cannot abide. The whole concept of multimedia and people being a part of that... I don't do any of it. I'm amazed that anybody would. Snapchat or whatever... I don't know what it is but I'm assuming you take a picture of somebody and then you send it to other people. For what reason? I don't know! But my daughter is very into it, and one of my sons is kind of into it. I don't care. I can't imagine that anyone's that interested in what anybody else is doing. I'm not. I don't know if that removes me in a bad way. It's not that I don't care about them-if I were sitting and talking and having a beer with them, then we'd be having a great time. But if I don't know somebody, why do I want them to know I'm having a taco, for Christ's sake?

I never experienced Walt Disney in any way other than him being like my grandfather. He reminded me of my dad's dad. And I was a little different from the other kids at the studio because I was a baseball player, and he liked that. I was just making money doing movies, and I liked it. But I was just at the beginning of my long journey to play professional baseball and hopefully make it as far as I could, so I never really thought I'd stay an actor. That said, I took acting very seriously, always knew my lines and really went after it. I wanted to do it well. So I never had any reason to see Walt Disney as anything other than what I saw him as: a fun, creative guy who was a joy to work with and was always very good to me. There's three hundred and sixty degrees to everybody, but that said, when you've created something as positive and significant to the world as Walt Disney did, I'm rather uninterested in things like how he wiped his ass.

Somebody once said to me 'I look at your career and it looks like it was controlled by a drunk driver.' And I said that is actually true. I can't deny it.

[about the Dexter Riley series] Those movies were very successful in their day. That's why they kept making them. They were just fun to do. When you're me and you look at all the things you got to do, I'm really glad that's part of it. I would have missed that had I not been able to do them.

I don't know if there has been a character much like Snake before. I think the audience will pull for him because he's trying to accomplish something. I don't think he'll work his way into anybody's heart though, like John Wayne did in The Searchers (1956). He's a fairly cold person, but to me, he's very sensitive. He's living in a colder society as well. The fantasy of what the situation could be like in New York City in 1997 changes his whole outlook.

[Why he turned down Flash Gordon (1980)] The thing I was interested in about the project was that it was a $40-million picture, and I thought maybe I should do something like that because it would be a big breakthrough for me. However, I just couldn't bring myself to the character. It seemed to me that the most interesting stuff in the script didn't involve Flash. He didn't have anything really good to do. He was Flash Gordon, but that wasn't good enough for me. I tried to get Dino to talk about that, but we just kept going around in circles.

[about Deepwater Horizon (2016)] I read the script, and I went, oh yeah, I know about this, this is the oil spill deal. And I was really shocked when I found out that 11 people died. Perished. Many survived, and there were some miraculous tales. And I thought, is that where we are now as a society, where we need to know about the ecological, potentially disastrous thing, more than we need to know that people got killed?

[on the ending of The Thing (1982)] We don't even know if we're real. We don't know, we don't know. I think the audience can figure it out. I think that's what makes 'The Thing' great, is you don't know, what if this already happened? Are you you? How would you know?

Some of the crazy reviews we got on Escape from L.A. (1996)... "Do Carpenter and Russell realize they've made a lefty movie?" That was my favorite of all. Boy, did they not get it. That guy really didn't get it. His agenda is so in his face he can't get it's just about a guy who wants to have a cigarette! At the end of the movie he just wants you to get out of his face! He blows the match out on you. Go home! Get away! Die! Leave me alone!

[to stepdaughter Kate Hudson after she lost at the 2001 Oscars] Congratulations, now you can have a career.