Jackie Earle Haley Quotes

I was into sports in high school, but I got kicked out of Richmond High at 17, so I never graduated. However, I still get invites to the class reunions... I don't know that I want to see how everyone looks now.

I love meeting 'the Odd Man Out' - like fans of 'Baywatch' who regret, as I do, that Tower 12 Productions didn't put nearly as much energy into writing and directing the show as they put into photographing and editing it.

I was almost as famous at Indiana for my television shows as I was my coaching. That's kind of embarrassing when you think about it.

I didn't start out to become famous, so when it disappeared, I thought, well, that happens sometimes.

My children and their generation are not aware of the stardom I had enjoyed during my younger days.

I woke up famous for about a minute, then stopped being famous again.

We all got older, and we'd tell our children things like, 'Mommy used to be in a famous rock band,' but they didn't believe us. Part of the reason for our reunion was to show our children what we did to make the lives they have possible.

When you aren't doing too many films, people find other things to write about you.

Sometimes I'll have a brief window of mini-fame thanks to 'Access Hollywood.' But it only lasts a couple of days, and then no one recognizes me anymore.

Being a celebrity doesn't even seem to keep the fleas off our dogs — and if being a celebrity won't give me an advantage over a couple of fleas, then I guess there can't be much in being a celebrity after all.

Do we always grind through the present, doomed to throw a gold haze of fond retrospect over the past?

Sometimes I sit in my den at home and read stories about myself. Kids used to save whole scrapbooks on me. They get tired of them and mail them to me. I'll go in there and read them, and you know what? They might as well be about (Stan) Musial and (Joe) DiMaggio, it's like reading about somebody else.

The past is always a rebuke to the present.

We all have appointments with the past.

If two men who were friends in their youth meet again when they are old, after being separated for a life-time, the chief feeling they will have at the sight of each other will be one of complete disappointment at life as a whole; because their thoughts will be carried back to that earlier time when life seemed so fair as it lay spread out before them in the rosy light of dawn, promised so much — and then performed so little.

Every generation throws a hero up the pop charts.

Popularity was fickle and elusive, like trying to catch fireflies in a jar. You were either born with it or relegated to wallflower status according to your mysterious and unknowable workings of the universe.

We only have the past that we have. Not all of our deeds were incorrect.

[At age 92:] There are places I'd like to return to. But not as I was then but as I am now. 'Cause I'm trying to understand. And I've understood nothing.

Oh, the self-importance of fading stars. Never mind, they will be black holes one day.

The past is one evil less and one memory more.

When you're old you feast on your memories, and if you spend too much time on exercise, you may get old and not have many.

Fame, we may understand, is no sure test of merit, but only a probability of such; it is an accident, not a property of man.

I love acting. Oh, God, I love it. But all this fame and all this bullshit attention. I'm not supernatural. I've done nothing extremely special to deserve the position. It happens every couple of years, and it's happened to hundreds of people before me.