Looking for the best George Clooney quotes? Look no further! Discover a curated collection of 147 insightful and inspiring quotes by the talented actor, director, and activist. From his thoughts on success and relationships to his wit and humor, this compilation is a must-read for any George Clooney fan.
George Clooney Quotes
1- “I don’t know of an actor that the Coen brothers would come to and say, “Hey, I’ve got a movie for you to be in, if you want to do it,” that would say, “No.” That’s the truth.” -George Clooney
2- “Peace is a fulltime job. It’s protecting civilians, overseeing elections, and disarming ex-combatants. Peace, like war, must be waged.” -George Clooney
3- “Over the years, over the history of our country, liberals have stood on many of the right sides of the issues.” -George Clooney
4- “I enjoy going on motorcycle trips and stopping in small towns and enjoying drinks with the locals.” -George Clooney
5- “I think it’s the most responsible thing you can do, to have kids. It’s not something to be taken lightly. I don’t have that gene that people have to replicate.” -George Clooney
6- “Hosting is work. It means you don’t get to go up to your room and disappear and take a nap. Like everybody else does after lunch. I’m talking about hosting, not hosting a dinner party, but hosting people staying in your home.” -George Clooney
7- “I get asked a lot about getting into politics. I say, ‘Take a look at politics. You tell me what seems appealing about that.’” -George Clooney
8- “I don’t know if winning at any cost is wrong or not. There are times I’ve thought that the end justified the means.” -George Clooney
9- “Most of the time, I’m working in places I’m not familiar with. Sometimes it’s Slovakia, and sometimes it’s Hawaii. Not to bash on Slovakia, but I really did enjoy Hawaii.” -George Clooney
10- “I’m so lucky to have been raised the way I have, because my parents believed that everyone had the right to their own feelings, opinions, and existence; as long as they weren’t harming others, you had to defend those rights.” -George Clooney
11- “If people see me having dinner with a beautiful woman, they immediately believe that I’m having a love affair with her. Of course that’s rubbish. I’m not a playboy!” -George Clooney
12- “I think you should automatically donate your organs because that would turn the balance of organ donation in a huge way. I would donate whatever anybody would take, and I’d probably do the cremation bit.” -George Clooney
13- “In the United States 95% of the people who win elections have the most money. That’s it. So, money is a big part of elections. But that happens all the time.” -George Clooney
14- “You never really learn much from hearing yourself speak.” -George Clooney
15- “I have a real interest in pushing some of the limits of things that studios don’t want to make.” -George Clooney
16- “The timing for directing is usually because it takes that long to develop a piece and then do pre-production and then post-production. It takes at least a couple of years. I prefer directing to doing other things. Directing and writing seem to be infinitely more creative.” -George Clooney
17- “They say I was a bad Batman, that it was my fault, that I buried the franchise. But the truth is, it was a big project. I was pretty intimidated in that world. I did the best I could in the situation I was given.” -George Clooney
18- “If you don’t drink coffee, I am suspicious of your character and will not invite you to my Italian lake home.” -George Clooney
19- “We’re in a tight spot!” -George Clooney
20- “My life isn’t focused on results. My life is really focused on the process of doing all the things I’m doing, from work to relationships to friendships to charitable work.” -George Clooney
21- “Oceans is about glamour. I can’t go looking like a slob can I?” -George Clooney
“22- Whatever you do, don’t wake up at 65 years old and think about what you should have done with your life.” -George Clooney
23- “I don’t mind what they say as long as they’re not being mean.” -George Clooney
24- “I don’t believe in heaven and hell. I don’t know if I believe in God. All I know is that as an individual, I won’t allow this life – the only thing I know to exist – to be wasted.” -George Clooney
25- “I’m the old-fashioned type who prefers to meet a woman in a more normal setting. I don’t like to feel that I’m being hunted down. I’ve always liked to do my own hunting when it comes to meeting women.” -George Clooney
26- “I’m not quite sure what the santicity of marriage is.” -George Clooney
27- “The last real movie stars were probably Redford and Newman. And things were different then. There wasn’t this amazing amount of magazines and information about them.” -George Clooney
28- “I had to stop going to auditions thinking, ‘Oh, I hope they like me.’ I had to go in thinking I was the answer to their problem.” -George Clooney
29- “There is a strange pecking order among actors. Theatre actors look down on film actors, who look down on TV actors. Thank God for reality shows, or we wouldn’t have anybody to look down on.” -George Clooney
30- “I’m really white trash.” -George Clooney
31- “If I had been with all the women that I was said to have been with, I wouldn’t have had the time to shoot a single movie!” -George Clooney
32- “I think people in Italy live their lives better than we do. It’s an older country, and they’ve learned to celebrate dinner and lunch, whereas we sort of eat as quickly as we can to get through it.” -George Clooney
33- “Directing is much more satisfying to me than acting.” -George Clooney
34- “I don’t believe in happy endings but I believe in happy journeys.” -George Clooney
35- “It’s not ideal to have three films coming out at once.” -George Clooney
36- “You have only a short period of time in your life to make your mark, and I’m there now.” -George Clooney
37- “Directing is really exciting. In the end, it’s more fun to be the painter than the paint.” -George Clooney
38- “Life’s better with company. Everybody needs a co-pilot.” -George Clooney
39- “It’s very hard when the product your selling to an entire country is yourself and you’re just selling the hell out of it all the time. But politicians have a tremendous amount of ego to be able to do it.” -George Clooney
40- “The only failure is not to try.” -George Clooney
41- “If you’re going to do a romantic comedy it was about housing it in something that we haven’t seen before.” -George Clooney
42- “I’ve certainly done some turkeys along the way and made some dumb choices in my career, mostly early on. I’m one of the lucky ones who got to make a lot of mistakes very early when no one was paying attention.” -George Clooney
43- “We’re picking on people we can beat.” -George Clooney
44- “In the time that we’re here today, more women and children will die violently in the Darfur region than in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Israel or Lebanon. So, after September 30, you won’t need the UN – you will simply need men with shovels and bleached white linen and headstones.” -George Clooney
45- “I grew up at a time where I think most people had a social and political conscience. Some of the biggest changes in our country’s political history happened at the time I was growing up, so I was raised to be a part of those things and to participate and I will continue to do that as much as I can.” -George Clooney
46- “The idea that every time you do a film you’re supposed to be tortured confuses me. I mean, guys who say, ‘Oh, it’s really tough, my character is really suffering’ -come on. For us, even in the rotten ones we’ve had a good time. I don’t think you have to suffer.” -George Clooney
47- “After a while, you just want transportation, and things like cool cars or motorcycles are all about getting attention. I get all the attention I could ever need, so I kind of like being in a minivan and people not paying so much attention to me.” -George Clooney
48- “An acting career usually has about a shelf life of ten years before people get sick of seeing you. It’s a good thing to have a job to fall back on and I really do enjoy directing.” -George Clooney
49- “I enjoy directing. I don’t know whether it’s improving or not, but it’s certainly evolving in different directions.” -George Clooney
50- “The first thing that I learned – and I understood it at a really young age – was that I could get a laugh. Really early. Because my mother and father are funny.” -George Clooney
52- “I’m always sort of optimistic about how good we are, as a country, at fixing ourselves.” -George Clooney
53- “Directors are the captains of the ship, and it’s your job as the lead actor to make sure that the rest of the cast understand that by doing whatever he says.” -George Clooney
54- “I go on YouTube when somebody says to look something up.” -George Clooney
55- “What I try to do is make sure that the directors I’m working with are on the same page and want to do the same kind of films. You can really protect yourself as an actor if you work with really good people. It can hide a lot of flaws along the way.” -George Clooney
56- “The truth of the matter is the real story are the people who rise above all of this incredible cruelty. Otherwise that cruelty wins.” -George Clooney
57- “Even other movies I wasn’t involved with, I’d watch them edit ’cause I really enjoy watching them go through their process. It’s a very economical, educational process.” -George Clooney
58- “When you first start out, you are just happy to get a job, any job. And as time goes on, either you move forward or screech to a halt.” -George Clooney
59- “I’ve been my most happy and my most unhappy in relationships. I have family and friends and people I care very much about. I’ve got a really, really, really good life.” -George Clooney
60- “Ninety percent of films are pretty mediocre, but they have a built-in audience and open on 3,000 screens.” -George Clooney
61- “I love children and I get along with them great. It’s just that I believe if you’re going to be a parent, there has to be something inside you that says, ‘I want a family.’ I don’t feel that sense of urgency.”
62- “It is rather astonishing that the United States does not play ball with the ICC, considering our country was the beacon of the idea of an international criminal court.” -George Clooney
63- “I find politics in almost every country I go to be incredibly different and incredibly similar and I’m never surprised by anything.” -George Clooney
64- “Shutting down the government is not how you make government work.” -George Clooney
65- “There’s no connection between al-Qaeda and Iraq.” -George Clooney
66- “I was very lucky to get well known much later in life. You need to have flopped quite a few times to get a sense of how little any of it has to do with you.” -George Clooney
67- “I enjoy living in a nice house and having a nice life. So I do two or three commercials overseas a year to sort of fill in, because they pay pretty well.” -George Clooney
68- “Any topical subject, if it’s Hollywood, will be a couple of years later because you’ve got to write it, produce it and distribute it, so automatically you’re never going to be right on the cutting edge of stories.” -George Clooney
69- “Everyone makes moral choices that better themselves and hurt someone else along the way – and whether or not the means justify the ends. And that, to me, is universal.” -George Clooney
70- “It’s fun to slap people around.” -George Clooney
71- “The hardest thing is trying not to correct everything on the Internet. It’d be night and day – wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. So you just have to say, All right, I’ll take it, bring it on.” -George Clooney
72- “I find that as you get older, you start to simplify things in general.” -George Clooney
73- “In the ’60s, when I was growing up, one of the great elements of American culture was the protest song. There were songs about the civil rights movement, the women’s rights movement, the antiwar movement. It wasn’t just Bob Dylan, it was everybody at the time.” -George Clooney
74- “You have to remember that in the microcosm of Cincinnati, Ohio, through northern Kentucky, my father was a big star, still is. So that made my sister and me really visible. Everybody knew us, talked about us.” -George Clooney
75- “My father ran for Congress in 2004, and I got a sense that there is no way to achieve much success without a certain amount of compromise.” -George Clooney
76- “I’ve been working with Pat Robertson on Africa debt-relief, and we disagree on virtually everything except certain very specific, inalienable rights, and the truth is that morality and patriotism come in all shapes and sizes.” -George Clooney
77- “You’ve got to remember that films don’t lead the way. People think that films are trying to lead society. Mostly, they’re reflecting the moods and thoughts that are going on in the country or around the world.” -George Clooney
78- “It’s not that I lead this oblivious life where I think I’ve got such a great personality that people want to spend time with me. If someone has a poster of you or asks for your autograph, clearly you can’t take them out on a date. It’s not that interesting if someone is just interested in you.” -George Clooney
79- “It’s hard to find actors that don’t feel contemporary when you put them in a period piece.” -George Clooney
80- “It’s incredibly unfair. You don’t see a lot of 60-year-old women with 20-year-old men onscreen.” -George Clooney
81- “I had my Aunt Rosie, who was famous and then not, so I got a lesson in fame early on. And I understood how little it has to do with you. And also how you could use it.”
82- “My biggest fear is doing the same things 10 years from now. That would be a failure. It’s something you have to constantly reassess, and asking yourself what you are going to do next makes it a good, long full journey.” -George Clooney
83- “Anytime there’s an actual grassroots movement that isn’t funded by people trying to create a grassroots movement, I find that interesting.” -George Clooney
84- “Whatever anybody believes as long as it doesn’t hurt anybody else, it’s fair enough, and works, and I think, is real, and matters. I don’t happen to have those beliefs, as much, you know, I don’t believe in those things.” -George Clooney
85- “I’ve been lucky enough to do a few films that will last longer than an opening weekend and those films are the ones I’m proud of.” -George Clooney
86- “I resolve not to drink liquids before donning the Bat-suit.” -George Clooney
87- “My little animal secrets must remain my little animal secrets. How I do my nails, that is really my business.” -George Clooney
88- “If you try desperately to hang on to something that used to be a success for you, it’s going to go away. You have to change.” -George Clooney
89- “I’m not out trying to prove anything. I’m sort of finished with that, so I get to play in other sandboxes and try and figure out what I like and I’m interested in.” -George Clooney
90- “We’re always going to be a society that’s going to slow down and look at the wreck on the side if the road if there is one. We’re always going to do that because it’s still fascinating and it’s human nature.” -George Clooney
91- “I don’t think that Hollywood will have much to do with changing politics. Hollywood usually reflects things.” -George Clooney
92- “Without question, I wake every night five times.” -George Clooney
93- “There’s a certain cruelty to being on a big screen as your eyelids start to sag and your hair falls out and turns gray that you either have to be able to handle or not. What you can’t do is try to force yourself into roles that you could have played or would have played ten years earlier.” -George Clooney
94- “When you’re young, you tend to believe what people tell you, and that’s dangerous. As you get older, you learn that you’re never as good or as bad as they say you are. If you understand this, you win.” -George Clooney
95- “The secret of directing is working with really good people.” -George Clooney
96- “When you first start out as an actor, you’re just looking for a good part. As time goes on, if you’re being held responsible for the movies themselves, you’re looking for a good script all around.” -George Clooney
97- “Fame can be very dangerous, because you can start to enjoy that part of it. And that’s not the good part of what I do for a living. The good part is the making of films. The unpleasant part is the fame part, if you’re not careful.” -George Clooney
98- “I’m a Method actor. I spent years training for the drinking and carousing I had to do in this film.” -George Clooney
99- “If you want to protect yourself as an actor, always work with good people.” -George Clooney
100- “Look, it’s very easy to sit here right now with some films in the bank that I like and think I have a shot and feel pretty cocky. But, you know, three years from now, I could very easily be saying, ‘Paper or plastic?’” -George Clooney
101- “I don’t care. Charlton Heston is the head of the National Rifle Association. He deserves whatever anyone says about him.” -George Clooney
102- “I love my grey hair and wrinkles. I love the fact that my face has more of an edge and more character than it did when I was in my twenties and thirties. No Botox for me.” -George Clooney
103- “If we turn our heads and look away and hope that it will all disappear then they will – all of them, an entire generation of people. And we will have only history left to judge us.”
104- “I don’t go on that many dates, because the truth is, anytime you go out in public with a girl when you’re well-known, there are pictures of you everywhere, and it’s like you’re a thing.” -George Clooney
105- “I’m like my mother, I stereotype. Its faster.” -George Clooney
106- “The problem is, we elected a manager and we need a leader. Let’s face it: Bush is just dim.” -George Clooney
107- “If you’re famous, I don’t – for the life of me – I don’t understand why any famous person would ever be on Twitter. Why on God’s green earth would you be on Twitter? Because first of all, the worst thing you can do is make yourself more available, right?” -George Clooney
108- “Honestly, as you can imagine, it really isn’t all that fun directing yourself, running back and forth to the monitors to see if you’re terrible or not.” -George Clooney
109- “I’ve always been an optimist.” -George Clooney
110- “I can’t give you 150 takes. I can’t even give you 30 different ways of doing it! I don’t have the talent or the range for it.” -George Clooney
111- “When you go to Detroit you see a town that is resilient, that’s just fighting to win again, and there’s an energy to that. Just watching a city really fighting to get back on its feet and watching the inner strength of a city is tremendous.” -George Clooney
112- “I rarely tell anybody what they should be doing with their life.” -George Clooney
113- “As you get older and ease your way into being a character actor you have to be comfortable with where you are in life and career, and I’m very comfortable with what I’m doing – working on projects I’m proud of.” -George Clooney
114- “Growing old on screen is not for the faint of heart.” -George Clooney
115- “My grandparents back in Kentucky owned a tobacco farm. So, to make money in the summer, we could cut and chop and top and house and strip the tobacco.” -George Clooney
116- “I would vote for Johnny Depp. We could use a president that could swashbuckle.” -George Clooney
117- “What you learn after you are 40 is that it is just about plugging up holes in the boat. You just hope you have enough corks to plug enough of the holes.” -George Clooney
118- “The funniest thing is that all the things every director goes through, I thought I could shortcut, but there was no getting around those issues.” -George Clooney
119- “I’ve met my bride-to-be in Italy and I will be married in Italy soon, in a couple of weeks. In Venice of all places! In closing, I guess what I would like to say is to my bride-to-be, Amal, that I love you very much and I can’t wait to be your husband.” -George Clooney
120- “I don’t believe in happy endings, but I do believe in happy travels, because ultimately, you die at a very young age, or you live long enough to watch your friends die. It’s a mean thing, life.” -George Clooney
121- “The simple truth is that everyone has an opinion, everyone has the right to voice it, and they should if they want to.” -George Clooney
122- “It’s very easy for people to be critical of President Obama’s first term, but let’s face it, he didn’t exactly inherit the country in the best shape.” -George Clooney
123- “Is Art worth dying for? Well I don’t know a single inanimate object that’s worth dying for.” -George Clooney
124- “If you’re in the room, you’ve grabbed the brass ring. You are all winners.” -George Clooney
125- “You learn from the mistakes you make and from the mistakes other people make. The truth is, you don’t learn from success; you learn from failure.” -George Clooney
126- “The truth is my development I hope is the same way as everything, which is, I succeed some, I fail some, and I keep slugging away at it. I really enjoy it. It’s fun.” -George Clooney
127- “I’m interested in making films that ask questions and don’t particularly provide answers.” -George Clooney
128- “You get better as an actor over time if you’re growing. Like singers.” -George Clooney
129- “Let’s face it: Bush is just dim.” -George Clooney
130- “I know love at first sight can work. It happened to my parents.” -George Clooney
131- “Most of the films I’ve done haven’t done particularly well. I’m surprised I’m continuing to work.” -George Clooney
132- “People know everything about everybody now.” -George Clooney
133- “I’m certainly the last person to give advice on, well, anything.” -George Clooney
134- “Getting older is not something that you’re not much concerned with.” -George Clooney
135- “The best lesson my mom taught me was how to be scrappy.” -George Clooney
136- “I want to be the George Clooney of music.” -George Clooney
137- “Anyone would be lying if they said they didn’t get lonely at times.” -George Clooney
138- “I doubt anybody gets taken seriously for very long. I’ll be on some reality show in about six years going, Hey, I had a great year in 2006.” -George Clooney
139- “On an awards-show day, I can play basketball, go in, take a shower and put on a tux – it takes me three minutes to put on a tux – and be out the door in 15 minutes.” -George Clooney
140- “My father taught me about having principles and how to treat people with respect. My aunt also taught me how to keep a perspective on everything that happens to you. So you learn to be humble and not take your success for granted.” -George Clooney
141- “At some point in our lifetime, gay marriage won’t be an issue, and everyone who stood against this civil right will look as outdated as George Wallace standing on the school steps keeping James Hood from entering the University of Alabama because he was black.” -George Clooney
142- “My parents were disappointed I didn’t finish college, and they were really upset when I went to Hollywood to become an actor. I was a big disappointment to them.” -George Clooney
143- “The rehearsal process in general is about trusting one another.” -George Clooney
144- “America can’t beat anyone anymore.” -George Clooney
145 “As time goes on and you become more comfortable in your career path, and things are starting to make sense, and it’s not just about work, you find that you’re able to focus on other things and other people.” -George Clooney
146- “Bush, Sharon, Blair and Rice are names that history will damn.” -George Clooney
147- “For me, the definition of a patriot is someone who is willing to constantly question the government; that’s what separates us from other countries.” -George Clooney