Michael Caine

“The absent are never without fault. Nor the present without excuse.”

“I won an Academy Award for 'The Cider House Rules,' playing an American.”

“When I'm doing an accent, you shouldn't notice it for a while, if I'm doing it right.”

“The American cinema in general always made stories about working-class people; the British rarely did. Any person with my working-class background would be a villain or a comic cipher, usual...”

“If someone is very upper-class, you have a stereotype of him which is probably true. If someone has a working-class accent, you have no idea who you're talking to.”

“People say I've 'retained' my Cockney accent. I can do any accent, but I wanted other working-class boys to know that they could become actors.”

“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.”

“Am I a car aficionado? No: for me, cars have always been just for transport. I didn't even know anyone who had a car until I was 14 or 15.”

“Alfie was the first time I was above the title; the first time I became a star in America.”

“Every time you get a movie, you get a medical. So you know, you know you're alright for a couple of weeks.”

“I wouldn't make an anti-American film. I'm one of the most pro-American foreigners I know. I love America and Americans.”

“Save your money. You're going to need twice as much money in your old age as you think.”

“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!”

“What a lot of people don't realize about gangs, in my opinion, is that a gang is not there to attack you. Eighty percent of the people in a gang are there to stop anyone from attacking them....”

“I was born Maurice Joseph Micklewhite. Imagine signing that autograph! You'd get a broken arm. So I changed my name to Michael Caine after Humphrey Bogart's 'The Caine Mutiny,' which was pla...”

“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.”

“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 unknow...”

“You cannot have one bathroom. And it don't matter how much you love your wife and everything, 'cause you wind up with no room at all. You just get a little corner, and you've got a toothbrus...”

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

“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 wa...”