Patrick Swayze

“When it looks like I may live longer than five minutes I'll drop cigarettes like a hot potato.”

“There are people who want me to do a cologne. They want to call it 'Patrick.' I was offered a fortune to make exercise videos. Posters, all kinds of stuff - something like $10 million worth. It's insanity. I'm not going to do any of it.”

“I like to believe that I've got a lot of guardian warriors sittin' on my shoulder including my dad.”

“To be honest, I've made a game out of trying to live through my James Dean, Janis Joplin, Freddie Prinze, Jim Morrison period, those demons that we all have that we're either successful or not at making work for us rather than destroy us.”

“I don't want to be Mr. Romantic Leading Man. I don't want to be the Dance Dude. I don't want to be the Action Guy. If I had to do any one of those all my life, it'd drive me crazy.”

“You know, I am a Leo. Lion is a giant part of me.”

“The longer your life goes on, the more death you face.”

“What's powerful about a love scene is not seeing the act. It's seeing the passion, the need, the desire, the caring, the fear.”

“What winning is to me is not giving up, is no matter what's thrown at me, I can take it. And I can keep going.”

“When you are a pit bull, and you love what you do and you are going to continue to grow, that talent will find its way out.”

“How do you nurture a positive attitude when all the statistics say you're a dead man? You go to work.”

“I don't want to be a poster child for cancer.”

“There's just something about dance. It's like a primal thing in all of us.”

“You can imagine me as a kid growing up in redneck Texas with ballet shoes, tucking the violin under my arm. I had to fight my way up.”

“Talent deserves to be honored. Hands deserve to be slapped if you do something stupid as well, but don't take it too far.”

“If you live through the initial stage of fame and get past it, and remember thats not who you are. If you live past that, then you have a hope of maybe learning how to spell the word artist.”

“I don't know how many hills and valleys I've had, how many times I've had to refocus my world and my life and my career.”

“When those you love die, the best you can do is honor their spirit for as long as you live. You make a commitment that you're going to take whatever lesson that person or animal was trying to teach you, and you make it true in your own life... it's a positive way to keep their spirit alive in the wo...”

“The way to screw up somebody's life is to give them what they want.”

“I am very, very clear on how difficult it is for a young kid out there to go into the arts without taking a lot of heat from his peers.”

“I dropped about 20 pounds in the blink of an eye. And then when you see it in the mirror, when all of a sudden you pull your eyes down, and the bottom of your eyes go yellow and jaundice sets in - then you know something's wrong.”

“I got completely fed up with that Hollywood blockbuster mentality. I couldn't take it seriously any longer.”