Quotes by Michael Caine

• I'm the audience's representative on earth.
• When I'm doing an accent, you shouldn't notice it for a while, if I'm doing it right.
• If you think you're going to be up for an Oscar, you schedule your moviemaking.
• If you're a movie actor, you're on your own - you cannot control the stage. The director controls it.
• January is the garbage can of movies in America, directly after all the Oscar contenders have been out.
• My own mentality is that I've retired. They send me these scripts and if I absolutely have to do it, then I go to work.
• Obsession is a young man's game, and my only excuse is that I never grew old.
• Oh, what a shock. My career must be slipping. This is the first time I've been available to pick up an award.
• Save your money. You're going to need twice as much money in your old age as you think.
• The absent are never without fault. Nor the present without excuse.
• The best research for playing a drunk is being a British actor for 20 years.
• The first actor I ever saw was The Lone Ranger. I thought, That's what I want to do.
• The standing ovation threw me... to be held in such regard in a town so full of talent is quite something.
• 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.
• I'm every bourgeois nightmare - a Cockney with intelligence and a million dollars.
• Be like a duck. Calm on the surface, but always paddling like the dickens underneath.
• Things are not quite what they seem always. Don't start me on class, otherwise you'll get a four-hour lecture.
• Funny things happen to you in movies for silly reasons.
• When you reach the top, that's when the climb begins.
• I'll always be there because I'm a skilled professional actor. Whether or not I've any talent is beside the point.
• A lot of my best parts I've been the second choice for, so you never get too egotistical about anything.
• Alfie was the first time I was above the title; the first time I became a star in America.
• Anyone can write. But comedy, you've got to do some writing. You get one comedy script to every 20 dramas.
• At 69, I got the girl! And it wasn't a 68-year-old girl, either.
• English is clipped in speech. Texas is exactly the opposite.
• For all my education, accomplishments, and so called 'wisdom'... I can't fathom my own heart.
• I'm a sort of boy next door. If that boy has a good scriptwriter.
• I did everything. I ran my life exactly as I wanted to, all the time. I never listened to anybody. I'm pig-headed.
• I felt a tremendous sadness for men who can't deal with a woman of their own age.
• I prefer to remake flops. Dirty Rotten Scoundrels was a remake of a flop, and The Quiet American is a remake of a flop.
• I read books like mad, but I am careful to to let anything I read influence me.
• I see myself as 38, but you don't notice it.
• I wouldn't make an anti-American film. I'm one of the most pro-American foreigners I know. I love America and Americans.
• Comedy is underrepresented in every actor's life, because it's so bloody difficult to write.
• I started with the firm conviction that when I came to the end, I wanted to be regretting the things that I had done, not the things I hadn't.