Johnny Depp is an American producer, musician, and a well-loved actor. His decades-long career has spanned every kind of character imaginable. His versatility as an actor shows that he has a curious mind and a restless urge to push beyond his comfort zone continually.
Depp’s unique talent gave him the edge of giving life to some of the most iconic movie characters. One of his most successful films includes the Pirates of the Caribbean series, among many others.
Due to his unwavering acting talent, he has been nominated for over ten Golden Globe Awards and three Academy Awards for Best Actor. He won awards for his portrayals in the movies Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Alice in Wonderland, and many more.
He is without a doubt one of the world’s most celebrated film stars, loved and admired by fans and critics alike. Here are the top 129 quotes and sayings by the one and only Johnny Depp to jumpstart your day.
Table of Contents
Johnny Depp Quotes About Acting
1. “I like the challenge of trying different things and wondering whether it’s going to work or whether I’m going to fall flat on my face.”
2. “I think it’s an actor’s responsibility to change every time. Not only for himself and the people he’s working with, but for the audience. If you just go out and deliver the same dish every time… it’s meatloaf again… you’d get bored. I’d get bored.”
3. “I’m not Blockbuster Boy.”
4. “Nobody’s ever made a film in the history of cinema where they weren’t expecting some return on their dough.”
5. “When I auditioned for ’21 Jump Street,’ it was a last minute thing. I had one of the worst flu that I’ve ever experienced in my life, and I was forced to go to the audition, the screen test.”
6. “If you catch me saying ‘I am a serious actor’, I beg you to slap me.”
7. “I was a million percent in love with Edward Scissorhands. I remember looking in the mirror on the last day of shooting… and thinking how sad I was to be saying goodbye to Edward.”
8. “My job, as an actor, is to give the director options. You can only hope that the takes that you thought were the best were chosen. But, then again, if I don’t watch it, I’ll never know.”
9. “When you’re doing a movie, your body doesn’t allow you to get sick until you finish.”
10. “Over the years all these vampire movies have come out and nobody looks like a vampire anymore.”
11. “I’m just an actor, and if I can leave something behind that my kids will be proud of, then that’s what I want. I don’t want my kids to be embarrassed by anything I’ve done.”
12. “At my very core, I’m pretty shy. I just happen to have a weird job.”
13. “I don’t pretend to be captain weird. I just do what I do.”
14. “Wes Craven was the guy who gave me my start, from my perspective, for almost no reason in particular.”
15. “Edward Scissorhands was tough to let go of because I found real safety in allowing myself to be that open, that honest. To explore purity. It was a hard one to walk away from.”
16. “It’s very, very important to me, no matter who the person is, to play that person with the utmost degree of truth that I’m able to bring. But playing a character like Jack Sparrow or Willy Wonka, that requires nothing but a degree of responsibility to the intent of the story – responsibility to the film-maker to deliver the goods.”
17. “The term ‘serious actor’ is kind of an oxymoron, isn’t it? Like Republican party or ‘airplane food.”
18. “If there’s any message to my work, it is ultimately that it’s OK to be different, that it’s good to be different, that we should question ourselves before we pass judgment on someone who looks different, behaves different, talks different, is a different color.”
19. “With any part you play, there is a certain amount of yourself in it. There has to be, otherwise, it’s just not acting. It’s lying.”
20. “When you’re confined to a TV series, and you have to play one character, it can make you insane. But it didn’t affect me. I got out in time.”
21. “I’ve had the honor and the pleasure and gift of having known Elizabeth Taylor for a number of years. You know, you sit down with her, she slings hash, she sits there and cusses like a sailor, and she’s hilarious.”
22. “I guess I’m attracted to these offbeat roles because my life has been a bit abnormal. The only thing I have a problem with is being labeled.”
23. “How many chances do you get to make a musical about a serial killer? The minute Tim Burton approached me, I was in.”
24. “What attracted me to Jimmy Bulger were the various facets of his personality and his humanity because I felt that the only way I could approach playing a character like him was to find his human side first and then map that out to see where it took the turn. He was a very complicated man.”
25. “I’m always for the Indian in the cowboy movie. Always.”
26. “I always have a decompression period at the end of a film. Sometimes it joyful, because you’re just happy to be done. Or it can be melancholy.”
27. “It’s good to experience Hollywood in short bursts, I guess. Little snippets. I don’t think I can handle being here all the time, it’s pretty nutty.”
28. “On a film, you start to get closer and closer with the people you’re working with, and it becomes like this circus act or this traveling family.”
29. “I think, as an actor, it is good to feel the fear of failing miserably. I think you should take that risk. Fear is a necessary ingredient in everything I do. But if I do ‘Hamlet,’ it will probably be in a small theater on a small stage, and it will have to be very, very soon because I’m getting a little long in the tooth for it.”
30. “It’s been insane. From Whitey Bulger to the Mad Hatter, you can imagine the schizophrenia.”
31. “I’ve never felt particularly ambitious or driven, that’s for sure, although I like to create stuff, whether it’s a little doodle, a drawing, a small painting or a movie or a piece of music, so I suppose I’m driven by that. Everything I’ve done has felt very natural, and it’s happened because it’s happened.”
32. “I’ve had some rank auditions where I embarrassed myself to new heights, which is hard for me to do. I was never good at auditioning. There are a number of actors over the years come up the ranks who are horrific at auditioning.”
Johnny Depp Quotes About Life
1. “There are times when you see how ridiculous is this life, how ludicrous it is, you know, leaving your house every morning and being followed by paparazzi.”
2. “I have known plenty of people who, in their later years, had the energy of children and the kind of curiosity and fascination with things like little children. I think we can keep that, and I think it’s important to keep that part of staying young. But I also think it’s great fun growing old.”
3. “For a long time I tried to manage an honesty and openness about my personal life because I’m human and I’m normal – well, semi-normal.”
4. “Simplicity – that’s what I want. It’s been a rare commodity for me for a number of years, but I enjoy being able to hang out with my girl, read the newspaper, and sit back and start to read a book by someone I admire, like Lawrence Krauss or Christopher Hitchens. And that’s it – simplicity, where the game of Hollywood doesn’t exist.”
5. “You use your money to buy privacy because during most of your life you aren’t allowed to be normal.”
6. “The quality of life is so different in France. There is the possibility of living a simple life. I would never contemplate raising my daughter in LA. I would never raise any child there.”
7. “There is nothing on earth that could ever make me want to relive certain years of my life when I was young.”
8. “As a teenager, I was so insecure. I was the type of guy that never fitted in because he never dared to choose. I was convinced I had absolutely no talent at all. For nothing. And that thought took away all my ambition too.”
9. “I am doing things that are true to me. The only thing I have a problem with is being labeled.”
10. “When my daughter was ill in Great Ormond Street, it was the darkest period of my life.”
11. “People say I make strange choices, but they’re not strange for me. My sickness is that I’m fascinated by human behavior, by what’s underneath the surface, by the worlds inside people.”
12. “I was angry and frustrated until I started my own family and my first child was born. Until then I didn’t really appreciate life the way I should have, but fortunately, I woke up.”
13. “Me, I’m dishonest, and you can always trust a dishonest man to be dishonest. Honestly, it’s the honest ones you have to watch out for.”
14. “You grow up a bit damaged or broken then you have some success but you don’t know how to feel good about the work you’re doing or the life you’re leading.”
15. “Life’s pretty good, and why wouldn’t it be? I’m a pirate, after all.”
16. “I do realize and understand very well on a profound level how lucky I am and what a privileged position it is and what it’s done ultimately for me, my family and my kids. But at the same time, there are moments in a man’s life when you just kind of want to feel somewhat normal.”
17. “You start getting hit with some very interesting situations in life – you as a parent – when they approach that teenage area, which is frightening because you still have memories of that age and the things you were doing at that age… Please don’t do what I did.”
18. “Music is still part of my life, but I hate the idea of people coming to see me play the guitar because they’ve seen me in movies. You want people who are listening to be only interested in the music.”
19. “There’s a drive in me that won’t allow me to do certain things that are easy.”
20. “It’s all kinds of these profound things crashing on you when your child arrives into the world. It’s like you’ve met your reason to live.”
21. “I never wanted to be the guy people looked at. I don’t think of myself as being a celebrity; it’s too mortifying.”
22. “I’m an old-fashioned guy… I want to be an old man with a beer belly sitting on a porch, looking at a lake or something.”
23. “Anything I’ve done up till May 27th, 1999 was kind of an illusion, existing without living. My daughter, the birth of my daughter, gave me life.”
Johnny Depp Quotes About Love
1. “I think the thing to do is enjoy the ride while you’re on it.”
2. “With my kids, they’re told 75 times a day that they’re loved. One thing I know is they feel loved and secure and happy and needed and necessary and a part of something.”
3. “The only creatures that are evolved enough to convey pure love are dogs and infants.”
4. “I am an American. I love my country and have great hopes for it. It is for this reason that I speak candidly and sometimes critically about it. I have benefited greatly from the freedom that exists in my country, and for this, I am eternally grateful.”
5. “What I love to do is paint people’s faces, y’know, their eyes. Because you want to find that emotion, see what’s going on behind their eyes.”
6. “One of the most beautiful things in the world is seeing a mommy with her kids. There’s nothing more beautiful, nothing more sublime.”
7. “Am I a romantic? I’ve seen ‘Wuthering Heights’ ten times. I’m a romantic.”
8. “When you have children, there is no room for lies, no room for anything but the truth. Anything other than that is a bad example, I believe.”
Johnny Depp Quotes, More Quotes And Sayings
1. “I hate watching myself on screen. I can’t stand it.”
2. “I’m doing a film called ‘Black Mass’ where I play James Bulger. The reason to play him is obvious to me. He’s a fascinating character. It’s not like anything I’ve done before on that level. I’m very excited to slide into that skin for a little bit.”
3. “I always wanted to be a character actor rather than the poster boy that they tried to make me 100 years ago. An actor has a degree of responsibility to change for the audience, to give them something new each time, to surprise and not bore them.”
4. “I marketed pens – on the phone. But the beauty of the gig was that you had to call these strangers and say, ‘Hi, how ya doing?’ You made up a name, like, ‘Hey, it’s Edward Quartermaine from California. You’re eligible to receive this grandfather clock or a trip to Tahiti.’ You promise them all these things if they buy a gross of pens.”
5. “The commercial flight thing, it just gets a little weird when you’re standing in line and suddenly you’re not just a guy standing in line anymore – you become sort of novelty boy.”
6. “The thing is, even if you’re playing sort of a heightened character and playing inside sort of heightened reality, you can still apply your own truths to those characters.”
7. “I made odd noises as a child. Just did weird things, like turn off light switches twice. I think my parents thought I had Tourette’s syndrome.”
8. “I remember in that red leisure suit I sort of felt like a Pizza Hut employee, and the white one was the ultimate, with the white turtleneck collar, that was the ultimate in bad taste.”
9. “Puberty was very vague. I literally locked myself in a room and played guitar.”
10. “The only gossip I’m interested in is things from the Weekly World News – ‘Woman’s bra bursts, 11 injured’. That kind of thing.”
11. “I was the guy who had been bouncing around the film industry for years, and I’d been lucky if five or 10 people would see my movies, so Captain Jack did a big flip for my career.”
12. “At 13, I was wearing plain t-shirts. Then I used to steal my mom’s clothing. She had all these crushed-velvet shirts with French-cut sleeves. And, like, seersucker bell-bottoms.”
13. “Lily’s really together – she’s a sharp kid and one of the smartest human beings I have ever met. Whatever she is doing, if she needs any advice, I’m there for her. Kids are going to make their own decisions, but I guess that the only thing you can do as a parent is to offer support. And I do.”
14. “I’d rather fight a buzzsaw than dance.”
15. “Captain Jack Sparrow is like a cross between Keith Richards and Pepe Le Pew.”
16. “The beauty, the poetry of the fear in their eyes. I didn’t mind going to jail for, what, five, six hours? It was absolutely worth it.”
17. “With Ed Wood, it was this sort of blending of Ronald Reagan, the Tin Man from ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ and Casey Kasem.”
18. “I have this fear of clowns, so I think that if I surround myself with them, it will ward off all evil.”
19. “France and the whole of Europe have a great culture and an amazing history. The most important thing though is that people there know how to live! In America, they’ve forgotten all about it. I’m afraid that the American culture is a disaster.”
20. “I detest jokes – when somebody tells me one, I feel my IQ dropping; the brain cells start to disappear. But something is funny when the person delivering the line doesn’t know it’s funny or doesn’t treat it as a joke. Maybe it comes from a place of truth, or it’s a sort of rage against society.”
21. “I don’t go anywhere without a book by James Joyce called Finnegan’s Wake.”
22. “I started out printing silk screen t-shirts. I sold ink pens. I worked construction. I worked at a gas station. I pumped gas. I was a mechanic for a little bit. I went into sewers, down into sewer lines. I had a lot of somewhat unpleasant gigs for a time there.”
23. “I did do a film that I refer to as ‘The Unpronounceable’ by a guy named Yvan Attal with Charlotte Gainsbourg. I had a bit part in there. That was quite fun, doing scenes in French.”
24. “I started out as a guitarist in the early ’80s.”
25. “People will say a movie bombed at the box office but I couldn’t care less.”
26. “There’s an innocence to Ozzy Osbourne. He’s mingling, but he’s somewhat detached.”
27. “I went through various stages in my childhood, as we all do, various stages of obsessions with people and things. And I did. I wanted to be the first white Harlem Globetrotter.”
28. “I don’t think it’s anything you ever get used to… for many years, I could never sort of put my name in the same sort of category as the word ‘famous’ or anything like that. And I just found it very uncomfortable… if you get used to it, then something must be wrong.”
29. “When I played Tonto in ‘The Lone Ranger’ and was playing the older Tonto, I would just leave the makeup on and go to sleep because it was a four or five-hour job; it was, from the waist up, all over me.”
30. “I don’t want to run around and look at a shot through a monitor. That doesn’t improve what I’m trying to do. I figure, once I’ve done my job, it’s none of my business.”
31. “When kids hit one year old, it’s like hanging out with a miniature drunk. You have to hold onto them. They bump into things. They laugh and cry. They urinate. They vomit.”
32. “When you disrespect Australian law, they will tell you firmly. Declare everything when you enter Australia.”
33. “I have a place that I get to go to in the Bahamas. It’s the only place that guarantees total anonymity and freedom.”
34. “It’s such a funny thing when you see your daughter transitioning from your baby, your little girl, to suddenly being a young woman. If you’re not really looking for it, you can miss it, and Lily-Rose is on that road already, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.”
35. “When I can focus on something like a guitar or painting, I do. I started painting people I admire, like Kerouac, Bob Dylan, Nelson Algren, Marlon Brando, Patti Smith, my girl, my kids.”
36. “I moved from Kentucky to Miramar, Florida, at about 8. I think I was in second grade. I still had my Southern accent, and down there, you got to experience a melting pot in full fury. All the kids I hung out with were, like, Sicilian kids from Jersey and New York.”
37. “I’m not sure I’m adult yet.”
38. “I suppose the only thing at 50 you can really start to look forward to is just total irresponsibility. As you get older, you can just sit in a chair, wear anything you want, you know you can walk down; old people dress cool. You know they wear sweatpants. The elderly have it down.”
39. “I’ll take photographs with the kids. People who want to take photographs with me. People who like the movies. People who supported me. I’ll do that all day, all night, that’s fine. But the bombardment of the paparazzi is just… I truly don’t understand. It just feels like this kind of gluttonous, horrific sport. It’s like sport.”
40. “I was ecstatic they re-named ‘French Fries’ as ‘Freedom Fries’. Grown men and women in positions of power in the U.S. government showing themselves as idiots.”
41. “If someone is being bullied or feels like an outsider, and they relate to something that I’ve done, even if it’s just igniting a spark, that’s great. I had that feeling as a kid. I was messed with no end.”
42. “I still approach a scene as one would approach a solo. There’s nothing set or pat.”
43. “After I had done the first ‘Pirates’ movie and ‘Secret Window,’ I went on vacation to escape with my kiddies and my girl, and someone said that there was an island down the road for sale. I said, ‘Oh well, let’s go see it.’ I looked at it, I walked on it, and I was done. It had to be.’
44. “Things go wrong for me all the time with technology. I’m not familiar enough with it, and I’m too old-school a brain to be able to figure it out. I’m dumb. Anything that I have to attack with my thumbs, for any period of time, makes me feel stupid. So, I try to avoid it, as much as possible, to protect my thumbs.”
45. “I want to be Ruler of the Exumas. I like the sound of it. I want to become Kurtz and live like in Lord of the Flies.”
46. “Escapism is survival to me.”
47. “There’s always that moment on every movie where you just go, Okay, this is that moment. I’m about to potentially fall flat on my face, and I might as well just dive in and see what happens.”
48. “When I was 12, I wanted to learn how to play the guitar, and I found a chord book in a shop, and I stuffed it down my trousers. And that’s how I learned to play the guitar.”
49. “It’s funny, because what happens to me when I read a script, when something grabs hold of me, I start getting these flashes of people or places or things or images.”
50. “Everything is just very, very blurry. I’ve never had a proper vision.”
51. “For me, it’s always more difficult and slightly exposing to play something that’s close to yourself. I always like to try to hide, just because I can’t stand the way I look.”
52. “There’s definitely healing properties to being in proximity to the ocean and that breeze. There’s something about that Caribbean climate and humidity.”
53. “Trips to the dentist – I like to postpone that kind of thing.”
54. “I think everybody’s nuts.”
55. “America is dumb. It’s like a dumb puppy that has big teeth that can bite and hurt you – aggressive. My daughter is four; my boy is one. I’d like them to see America as a toy – a broken toy. Investigate it a little, check it out, get this feeling, and then get out.”
56. “I may have a feather duster down my pants.”
57. “The idea of dancing is the only thing that scares me.”
58. “I don’t know if I can relax. Relax, I can’t do. My brain, on idle, is a bad thing. I just get weird. I mean, not weird. I get, I get antsy.”
59. “Tomorrow it’ll all be over, then I’ll have to go back to selling pens again.”
60. “There are necessary evils. Money is an important thing in terms of representing freedom in our world. And now I have a daughter to think about. It’s really the first time I’ve thought about the future and what it could be.”
61. “There’s no truth anymore.”
62. “It’s an odd thing when there is a fan page for my daughter who is not yet 13.”
63. “Prior to ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ – the first one in 2003 – I had been essentially known within the confines of Hollywood as box office poison, you know what I’m saying? You know, I basically had built a career on 20 years of failures.”
64. “When I met people they said, You do look like a hobo, but you smell really good.”
65. “I’m shy, paranoid, whatever word you want to use. I hate fame. I’ve done everything I can to avoid it.”
66. “When you’re confined to a TV series, and you have to play one character, it can make you insane. But it didn’t affect me. I got out in time.”
If you would like to get a glimpse of the life story of the legendary Johnny Depp, we would suggest you read Johnny Depp: A Modern Rebel by Brian J. Robb.
