Nicholas Cage Biography

On acting:

"To be a good actor you have to be something like a criminal, to be willing to break the rules to strive for something new."

"There's a fine line between the Method actor and the schizophrenic."

"I'm at the point now where I know I'm doing something right when a movie gets mixed reviews, because then I'm not in the box. I don't want to make it too easy for people and I don't want to make it too easy for myself. I want to try something unusual. I feel good about the bad reviews because I feel like I've affected them on some level. They may not know what I was trying to do but they felt something."

On himself:

"I am not a demon. I am a lizard, a shark, a heat-seeking panther. I want to be Bob Denver on acid playing the accordion."

"I needed to change my name just to liberate myself and find out I could do it without walking into a Hollywood casting office with the name Coppola."

"Hollywood didn't know if I was an actor or a nut or if I was this crazy character I was playing. I had developed an image of being a little bit unusual, different and wild."

On marriage:

"I'm sad about this, but we shouldn't have been married in the first place." – Cage speaking about his marriage to Lisa Marie Presley.