Quotes

I'm more than an actor. I'm an icon, an industry. [edited quote from interview segment while filming 'The Surreal Life' - full quote: "Okay, I'm more than an actor, I'm a musician, and a producer, and a dancer. And it's wonderful if people think that I'm an icon, an industry, but really, I'm just appreciative of the fact that I' still working"]

It was a great experience for a kid, because it was a bunch of kids playing on pirate ships and water slides, so looking back on it, it was the fondest experience of my childhood - about working on The Goonies (1985).

"It did not feel like something that was going to take over my life and destroy it. It felt like a subtle flower instead of a manipulative demon. That's the mystery of heroin." (USA Today)

I was famous before I knew my own name.

I didn't enjoy filming "A New Beginning" at all. It was about 40 degrees out and they 'rained' freezing cold water on me. Plus, they made me keep my eyes open during the downpour. Danny Steinmann, who was one tough director, kept yelling at me, saying I couldn't act! [Recalling the filming of his cameo appearance in Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (1985)].

I met my wife by breaking two of my rules: never date a girl seriously that you meet at a nightclub and never date a fan.

Oh, I see people everywhere. Some are celebs, but most of my friends are just regular people. The thing is, even celebs are normal people too. Just people.

I do have an Internet presence. Type in my name in a search engine and it brings up like 33,000 sites. They're all run by fans, which I supply the information to from time to time.

It all happens together. It's all a musical unleashing. It's a way to express your ideas or your visions creatively. I think, as a producer in the film world, a lot more of it is business and dollars; most of the creative stuff gets left out in the dark. I believe that with music, it's a much more creative flow and process from beginning to end. As an actor, you're pretty much a hired gun. You are reading other people's words off of a page and doing what they want you to do. With music, especially when you produce and write it yourself, you get a vision in your head, and that's exactly what's going to be there in the final product.

I am a vegetarian. I won't eat anything with a mother, or if it's dead. I've been a vegetarian for 15 years. I don't do it for health reasons. I do it because I don't believe in killing animals if you can get food in other ways.

I would make a few more reality shows, I like the exposure...I can't lie! They may be cheesy, but they are getting people noticed, and re-noticed, in my case.

My greatest gifts are my son and wife, I will bust my back to give them a solid life, one with everything I never had.

I have learned so many lessons about sobriety, and I thank my 'Higher Power' a million times a day. Things just really are a lot more serene when you aren't messed up.

People seem to just forget that celebrities have the rights to any other citizen.

[on the death of his friend Corey Haim] You see these people making great statements and that's wonderful and I hope they're all there for the memorial and I hope they're all there for the funeral. But where were they during his life?

(2012, on drugs and alcohol) I just don't like it. It's not like 'oh my God, I can't.' If I wanted to have a drink, I could. I just choose not to because I don't like it. If I wanted to do drugs, I guess I could do drugs, but I don't like drugs. They ruin people's lives, so I don't see the reason to do them.

(2012, on his positive outlook) I'm a positive person, and at the end of the day, no matter how much negative energy has been thrown at me, or just terrible situations - from abuse to being stolen from, lied to, talked terribly about. I mean, they've said the worst things about me. The industry people, people are jealous of me, people are my competitors, people go up against me - everybody wants to hate. Everybody wants to say something negative. I think my greatest tool and asset is that I'm able to just deflect it. It just jumps right off of me. Kind of like when you're a kid, and they go 'I'm rubber, you're glue, whatever I say bounces off me, and sticks onto you.' That's me. That's my life. You can keep talking badly about me, but I'll keep on rising above it as long as I believe in myself because belief is the most powerful tool that any of us have. If you have belief in your heart that you can stay positive; if you have belief in your heart that you can change things for the better no matter how dark times get, it doesn't matter, because they can always get better. Every day that you wake up and you're alive is a chance to fix it.

[2012, on Corey Haim] People have asked me to do one of the sequels to License to Drive (1988), and I'm like 'What do you mean? It's over, it's done, he's gone.' That's hard for me to wrap my head around sometimes. It doesn't feel like reality. It feels like in some alternate universe, he's still here with me.

(2012) I don't drink ­alcohol. My addiction has always been beautiful women, being ­surrounded by them.

[2013, on Bordello of Blood (1996)] Dennis Miller was the biggest dick I've ever worked with in the history of my career. He was terrible to the crew, treated people like shit, very disrespectful, very snobby. People would say "good morning" to him, and he would just ignore them or walk past them and grunt or something. He was just very rude. Actually, we got in a fight because of the way he was treating people; I couldn't stand to watch it. When I'm on a set, I feel like we're all there together, we're a team, we're there working as a family, and no one person is higher than another. They always do the star trip, like, "This star's got the bigger trailer, that star's got more assistants," or whatever, but to me that's all just a bunch of ego bullshit, and I don't buy into it. I don't play that whole game. For me, as long as I've got nice quarters to relax in between shots... We're all there to work, so it's a dig-in-and-put-your-nose-to-the-grindstone kind of thing. And Dennis Miller was the opposite of that. He literally was not only just rude and disrespectful to everybody, but he was doing crazy things like... I remember one day he stole a van from the transportation department in Vancouver and just decided to take off and drive around because he didn't feel like being on the set anymore. Now, anybody who knows anything about the movie industry knows, "Don't fuck with the Teamsters." You can do anything you want, but don't fuck with the Teamsters. And that's exactly what he did. I could go on and on about it, but the bottom line is that I was a huge fan of Dennis Miller's when I took that project on, I was very excited about the opportunity to work with him, and it was really my first lesson in learning that it's sometimes best to leave people on the screen. When you get to meet them and get to know them and find out who they really are, it's very disheartening. Dennis Miller was definitely my slap in the face to that cold, hard reality. The other thing was that when he went out there to promote the film, he didn't even do good by the promotion. He literally went on the late-night talk shows and said, "Don't go see this film, because it sucks!" I mean, he killed the box office singlehandedly. But the movie itself I actually really enjoyed. I thought that Angie (Everhart) was great, Erika Eleniak was great, Chris Sarandon was great. There were a lot of great actors, which definitely gave it the support that Dennis was lacking. And the film overall, the writing, the direction... Gilbert Adler did a great job directing it. I thought it was very funny. I love the Tales From The Crypt franchise because, again, it's the comedy-horror thing which I think works so well. I really enjoyed doing the episodic version, the television series. And I think I would've had a lot more fun doing that film if anybody else was playing the lead role.

[2013, on his small role in Maverick (1994)] Well, that was because of my relationship with Richard Donner [who also directed The Goonies (1985)]. Dick is like a father to me. Originally they wanted me to play one of the poker players at the table, but... I don't know, it was apparently something to do with Mel Gibson. He didn't think I had the right look for that part. So Dick wanted to still throw me in there, even though Mel apparently didn't agree, so whatever. Mel didn't really want me for the role that Dick wanted me for, and Mel wasn't, like, directing it or anything - I'm not even sure if he was a producer or anything on it - but I do know that they gave him an incredible amount of power, and he made me come in and audition for it, and then he didn't give me the job. Oh, well, turnabout is fair play. Karma and all that.

[2013, on Meatballs 4 (1992)] The movie that we were making wasn't the movie that they ended up marketing and promoting. That's why you noticed the, uh, extreme difference in what you were watching. Because when I agreed to do that movie, I agreed to do a movie called Happy Campers, which was kind of a romantic comedy, but it was a comedy-drama as well. A regular comedy but with some hard-hitting, serious moments. Kind of a Happy Gilmore/Billy Madison vibe, where it's very funny, tongue-in-cheek, but then there's also the seriousness of the implications of the plotline and all that. It would've actually been a pretty good movie on its own merits. But unbeknownst to us on the set, as we were in the process of making the film, the producers decided to go out and make a deal with HBO to run it as a first-run feature, and they said that the only way that they would want to do that was if it was a franchise movie. So they said, "Well, what kind of franchises do you have available?" "Hey, how about Meatballs? We can call it a Meatballs movie!" "Okay, great!" They literally made the decision to make it Meatballs 4 after we were already on set. As I'm sure you would be aware from looking over my career, a third sequel to a movie that I was never involved with originally is not really something that I would jump into. So I never signed up to do Meatballs 4, nor would I have signed up to do Meatballs 4. I was completely swindled on that one... I was just fresh out of rehab, which is part of the reason I got swindled on it. It was also because I didn't have all my business savvy yet. I was still a kid, and I was still trying to figure out how to be a man in the business world and be responsible and take care of my own business, vs. letting my parents dealing with it and that kind of stuff. But being newly sober, it was very frustrating to try and assimilate what exactly was expected of me as a sober individual on a movie set. It was a new experience.

Sometimes you have to get through the darkness to see the light.

At some point during the filming of Lucas (1986), Corey Haim explained an adult male convinced him it was perfectly normal for older men and younger boys in the business to have sexual relations, that it was 'what all guys do.' ... So they walked off to a secluded area between two trailers during a lunch break for the cast and crew, and Corey Haim, innocent and ambitious as he was, allowed himself to be sodomized.

(2010) I was awakened at 8:30 this morning by my brother and sister knocking on my bedroom door. They informed me of the loss of my brother, Corey Haim. My eyes weren't even open all the way when the tears started streaming down my face. I am so sorry for Corey Haim, his mother Judy Haim, his family, my family, all of our fans, and of course my son who I will have to find a way to explain this to when he gets home from school.