Jack Nicholson Quotes

Love is not complicated; people are, and that is changing the perception of love.

I like playing human beings - I don't believe in good or bad. I don't believe in black and white. I believe in different tonalities. I believe in different layers of emotions and states of mind. I believe in characters that can be human.

I think I was a little disappointed in her. I expected then people to be more of a piece than I do now, and I was distressed to find so much vindictiveness in so charming a creature. I did not realize how motley are the qualities that go to make up a human being. Now I am well aware that pettiness and grandeur, malice and charity, hatred and love, can find place side by side in the same human heart.

I feel like most people aren't either/or, they're both/and. You're both magnanimous and petty. You're both kind and cruel. You're never just one thing.

I'm a people's person, believe it or not. I just have a dark side to me, which we all do.

The endings for all my characters seem sufficiently human and messy for me to feel comfortable with them. In some ways they have only moved an inch, but sometimes an inch is a great distance.

Nobody looks like what they really are on the inside. You don’t. I don’t. People are much more complicated than that. It’s true of everybody.

You could pick another two people and you'd have a whole other story and that's why films about love get made and made and made - because there's a million ways to tell it and no two stories are the same.

I do believe that half a dozen commonplace attorneys could so mystify and misconstrue the Ten Commandments, and so confuse Moses' surroundings on Mount Sinai, that the great law-giver, if he returned to this planet, would doubt his own identity, abjure every one of his deliverances, yea, even commend the very sins he so clearly forbade his people.

I love a lot of people, understand none of them.

Personally I don't believe in bad people. I think there's always a reason for people acting badly.

Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin.

People have sort of a problem trying to see an end to a situation as being positive or romantic.

The deeper reality is that I’m not sure if what I do is real. I usually believe that I’m certain about how I feel, but that seems naive. How do we know how we feel?…There is almost certainly a constructed schism between (a) how I feel, and (b) how I think I feel. There’s probably a third level, too—how I want to think I feel.

... there is wisdom in madness and strong probability of truth in all accusations, for people are complete, and everyone is capable of everything.

Life's complicated and people do things for a lot of reasons. I think if you live in a black-and-white world, you're gonna suffer a lot. I used to be like that. But I don't believe that anymore.

Well, you never knew exactly how much space you occupied in people's lives. Yet from this fog his affection emerged--the best contacts are when one knows the obstacles and still wants to preserve a relation.

People tend to criticize their spouse most loudly in the area where they themselves have the deepest emotional need.

Ah. In my experience, when people say they don't know whether they love someone, they usually mean no.

There's a big difference between a movie about relationships and a movie in which people talk about relationships. It seems like a lot of people have confused the two.

People who are harder to love pose a challenge, and the challenge makes them easier to love. You're driven to love them. People who want their love easy don't really want love.

People are weird. We do live on all levels at the same time and you can be fighting and flirting, and there can be fury and sexual tension. All that stuff can co-exist so it's just a testament to how complex we are. Or maybe it's a testament to how boringly we try and simplify everything.

you can love a person and still hate the decisions they've made, can't you?

There are novels that end well, but in between there are human beings acting like human beings. And human beings are not perfect. All of the motives a human being may have, which are mixed, that's the novelists' materials. That's where they have to go. And a lot of that just isn't pretty. We like to think of ourselves as really, really good people. But look in the mirror. Really look. Look at your own mixed motives. And then multiply that.

Why was love so easy for some people and so hard for others?