Robert Downey Jr. Quotes

Acting is a life experience. I'm always learning things when I'm making a movie. So the fame part of it is fine when you consider what you get out of this job.

Whatever I watched, whatever I loved in 36 years of life on Earth, probably had some influence on me.

I feel like I'm getting the best parts of my career, in my 50s.

Really you don't need more information. If you've lived twenty years, you probably have enough material for the rest of your life

As a man - no longer a teenager that can play those really young roles, but as a man - I think I've only just got good in the last three or four years. I only watch my old films because, as someone who wasn't trained, that's how I look at my mistakes; I see something and I go, "Well, that's not good," and I learn from my mistakes. Same with the writing and same with the directing.

You simply don't get to be wise, mature, etc., unless you've been a raving cannibal for thirty years or so.

It has taken me thirty three years and a bang on the head to get my values right.

A magazine editor recently asked me to sit down on my 40th birthday and write an article on the most important things I had learned in my first 40 years. I told him that the chief thing I had learned was that the copybook maxims are true, but that too many people forget this once they go out into the heat and hustle and bustle of the battle of life and only realize their truth once one foot is beginning to slip into the grave. The man who has won millions at the cost of his conscience is a failure.

I also think within the scene, a specific scene - if I were to play a part that I played 10 years ago now, my interpretation of that scene would be totally different. I would be making different choices. Because I can't somehow subtract all of the experiences that I've had in my life. And it's fascinating to see, because somewhere I'm very reflective in that. You know, I've been playing basically actually close to 40 years old, so I'm somewhere lost in age in this movie. But it's been fascinating to see that I can't subtract that time.

I like to think of myself as an actress, I think of going through all of the films as my kind of film academy, the way that I've learnt.

I'm sure that like anybody else, I'm probably the sum total of my life experiences. If I'm smart and I've gained any wisdom, I have learned something from each of those experiences including different jobs I've taken throughout my life. The problem is, sometimes you don't realize you've learned something until maybe years later.

The only lesson I really learned from [Gigi Does It] was that I shouldn't bite off more than I could chew. I've written a bunch of scripts and stuff - every actor has - and that was the first thing that got made.

I could vanish the silk better than Ben Vereen - that was for sure. So I think maybe they said, "Okay, maybe he has something to offer." Years pass and I get a bit of a career, and Ben Vereen ends up hosting one of my specials where I walked through the Great Wall of China. Things came full circle in kind of an ironic way, when you have that honor of people that have influenced you so much host your show. It's a huge experience in your life.

I've tried most of my career to transform myself towards characters.

In one's youth every person and every event appear to be unique. With age one becomes much more aware that similar events recur. Later on, one is less often delighted or surprised, but also less disappointed than in earlier years.

I was 19 when I recorded my first album, and I've been exposed to many things during these last few years; all the baby fat is gone.

I just think of interesting roles to play. I guess that I have matured, I guess growing up and becoming a man, your taste in characters changes and I think I have become more interested in active characters as I have become less contemplative in my personal life. Things have become a little bit more interesting in the doing these days and less interesting in the thinking about the doing.

I was facing life for the first time. I was 12 years old, but I felt like a 20 year old. I knew then what life was.

The years don't always add wisdom, but they do add perspective.

I think if you were to talk to women who have run, both successfully and unsuccessfully, nearly all of them would say, "You learn so much." You learn about yourself, what you're capable of doing.... And it doesn't have to all happen when you're young - I mean, one of the most powerful women in American politics is Nancy Pelosi. She had five children. She didn't go into politics until her youngest child was in high school.... That's one of the great things about being a woman in today's world: You have a much longer potential work life than our mothers or our grandmothers did.

After a year, I thought gee I don't really need college anymore, which wasn't correct, but that's what I thought.

I think that there is no doubt that every experience you have in your life, whether it's playing a character or something else, you bring that to the work.

I didn't know that my sister was really my mother until I was thirty-seven years old. But life has taught me that there have been a lot of things that I didn't know.

Everything that I talk about, pretty much, are things that I learned or understood over the years.

Contrary to what might be expected, I look back on experiences that at the time seemed especially desolating and painful with particular satisfaction. Indeed, I can say with complete truthfulness that everything I have learned in my seventy-five years in this world, everything that has truly enhanced and enlightened my existence, has been through affliction and not through happiness, whether pursued or attained