Phrases

-Life will knock us down, but we can choose whether or not to stand back up.

-Nothing makes me more determined to succeed than someone telling me something’s impossible.

-Do not let circumstances control you. You change your circumstances.

-The best fights are the ones we avoid.

-Family is not who’s blood is in you, is who you love and who loves you

-Sometimes it takes only one act of kindness and caring to change a person’s life.

-You don’t need a reason to be nice to someone.

-Don’t try to be like Jackie. There is only one Jackie. Study computers instead.

-I never wanted to be the next Bruce Lee. I just wanted to be the first Jackie Chan.

-Martial arts is for defense. It’s not for attacking. So when people are fighting, always, always, defend.

-I do small things. I try to do good things every day.

-If everyone does some good, think of what a good world this will be.

-Being still and doing nothing are two completely different things

-It only hurts when I’m not laughing.

-As one tale ends, so another begins.

-Most of the time, I’m not even working; I’m just helping people, because I feel that I am too lucky.

-I allowed myself to be bullied because I was scared and didn’t know how to defend myself. I was bullied until I prevented a new student from being bullied. By standing up for him, I learned to stand up for myself.

-We live now in a global village and we are in one single family. It’s our responsibility to bring friendship and love from all different places around the world and to live together in peace.

-Pain is my daily routine. As long as I don’t go to the hospital, it’s nothing for me.

-I’m good for some things, bad for a lot of things.

-Coffee is a language in itself.

-The children right now, the young children, everybody should go to a martial arts school. Why? Because as soon as they go to a martial arts school, they learn discipline.

-We have to do what we can to help wherever and whenever it is possible for us to help.

-Kung fu lives in everything we do. It lives in how we put on a jacket and how we take off a jacket. It lives in how we treat people. Everything is kung fu.

-Why did I become Jackie Chan? Mostly because I work very hard. When people were sleeping, I was still training.

-When you are learning about a martial art, it is about respect.

-A lot of people ask me when I do a stunt, ‘Jackie, are you scared?’ Of course I’m scared. I’m not Superman.

-Martial arts is not for hurting people, it’s for protecting people.

-I hope next time when we meet, we won’t be fighting each other. Instead we will be drinking tea together.

-My dream is to continue filming until my body tells me to stop.

-If one does not attach himself to people and desires, never shall his heart be broken. But then, does he ever truly live?
When I was young I trained a lot. I trained my mind, I trained my eyes, trained my thinking, how to help people. And it trained me how to deal with pressure.

-I want to build up my philosophy… my philosophy with kung fu is to respect people.

-When I was a young stunt guy the director would say: “You’re useless…” But I wanted to be the best, I wanted to be a super stunt guy. That’s how I built myself, because of martial arts and everything.

-I know I have to run 20 more minutes if I eat ice cream.

-Basically, I eat everything, but I just do more training.

Even during the promotion I told people that I didn’t like Rush Hour. The jokes I didn’t understand and the fighting, compared to my Hong Kong films was terrible. A lot of people didn’t like it. But mostly people did like it, they really liked it. Rush Hour really brought me to the American family audience.

-In my view, Zhang Lanxin is one of our best female martial artists, and I can’t rate her highly enough.

-If I need to buy a TV, I’ll definitely buy a Japanese TV. A Chinese TV might explode.

-Anyone can be a Superman, but nobody can be Jackie Chan.

-I want to make people laugh and I want to try to encourage world peace.

-American stuntmen are smart – they think about safety. When they do a jump in a car, they calculate everything: the speed, the distance… But in Hong Kong, we don’t know how to count. Everything we do is a guess. If you’ve got the guts, you do it. All of my stuntmen have gotten hurt.

-I think every young child can learn through any martial art.

-They would then learn to respect their life, respect their parents, respect their country, and respect the whole world.

-I’m crazy, but I’m not stupid.

-No matter how much more I practice, my English will never be perfect. If it is really terrible, I’ll correct it, but otherwise, I do it my Jackie Chan way.

-Bruce Lee brought the martial arts movie to the attention of the world – and without him, I don’t think that anyone would have ever heard of Jackie Chan.

-When I came to Hollywood, I spoke no English – except nobody bullied me. Every day, I had nothing to do except training in English, to keep talking.

-Chinese people need to be controlled; otherwise, they will do whatever they want.

-When I work I do it from my heart. And my heart is that I bring love to the world. When I travel around the world I bring my love. I bring so much love in my heart. I hope you can feel that.

-My skull, my eyes, my nose three times, my jaw, my shoulder, my chest, two fingers, a knee, everything from the top of my head to the bottom of my feet. Listing what body parts he has broken

-When I got depressed, I watched Bruce Lee movies. I learned everything from Bruce Lee.

-Stigma hurts. Because of AIDS, children are bullied, isolated and shut out of school. They are missing out on education.

They are missing out on medicines. Children are missing your love, care and protection. Join me. And become a stigma buster. UNITE FOR CHILDREN UNITE AGAINST AIDS
I only want my work to make people happy.

-First, there are many who can fight, but they’re small in stature; Zhang Lanxin is 177 cm [5’9″+] tall, with very long hands and legs, and very quick. In the scenes, I tried to show all of her special strengths and qualities. Plus, Zhang Lanxin has extraordinary staying power: it was only yesterday at the airport that I saw her cell phone photos from the hospital where she was having blood clots in her knee being cleared up, and I hadn’t known till then that she had this problem.

-The movie business is a big gamble.

-Cinema reflects culture and there is no harm in adapting technology, but not at the cost of losing your originality.

-We learn martial arts as helping weakness. You never fight for people to get hurt. You’re always helping people.
When life knocks you down, you can choose to get back up.

-The action star’s life is very short. Back in Asia, I can do whatever I want to do. I’m the producer, I’m the director, I can do so many things, but in Hollywood any time I present a script they say: “No, no, no, Rush Hour 3, Rush Hour 4.”

-Of course I get hurt.

-Actually, the few good Chinese movies that foreign countries choose to import are Zhang Yimou’s, and mine, a few directors, but how many movies can we make in a year? We can only make a few, while they turn them out continuously.

-I hate interviews – but you have to do them.

-I am really, really tired.

-Every time I make an American film I just trust the American director and American writer. Myself, I would never make this kind of film. For me, those kinds of films are ridiculous.

-They don’t make sense.

-One thing we haven’t mentioned is something everyone should understand very clearly. Look at the budget that was invested in ‘Avatar’: who in China has that kind of money to spend on making a movie? So we as Chinese filmmakers should work together to make Chinese movies that can compete as best we can for Chinese audiences, not make lousy movies, but make the best we can for that audience.

-Concentrate the money, the talent we have on making good movies [for China].

-I do small things. I try to do good things every day.

-I’m very pessimistic about that, no matter how hard we may try. The Chinese market is huge, but out of last year’s $2 billion box office, $1.8 billion was taken in by foreign movies, and just $200 million by our own movies, no matter how much we have learned of their techniques, or their good practices. The Hollywood movies imported into China are all good movies; does the U.S. make lousy movies? Yes, too many lousy movies, but the imports are good films, so how can they not be box office hits? They’re all hits.

-I want to show audiences I can act.

-I want to be an Asian Robert De Niro.

-Honestly, every movie I do in America, the only challenge for me is English. I’ve done everything already, for me it’s pretty easy. Only the English.

-Very difficult to understand American audience, what they like, what they don’t like. Some movie I like very much, it doesn’t work. Some movie I don’t like, it gets big box office.

-Very difficult.

-It is totally different making films in the East than in the West. In the East, I make my own Jackie Chan films, and it’s like my family. Sometimes I pick up the camera because I choreograph all the fighting scenes, even when I’m not fighting. I don’t have my own chair. I just sit on the set with everybody.

-Most of the time I’m not even working, I’m just helping people, because I feel that I am too lucky. If there really is a god, then he really looks after me. All these years he’s taken care of me, my career keeps getting better and better.

-Whatever I want just seems to come. And it keeps coming.

-So I promised myself that I have to pay for this, payback society. So this is why I started my Jackie Chan Foundation to help children and sick kids and people in hospitals.

-Speaking English is like tongue-twist for me. I can speak each word perfect, but then you have to string them together like, ‘Blah, blah, blah.’ That’s when I get crazy.

-Money for me today does not really matter.

-My schedule goes: wake up, running, exercise, downstairs, running shoes off, then to the shower. That’s the Jackie Chan diary.

-Officials of governments that use or produce landmines should be forced to see the reality of how landmines hurt people and make them suffer, because this would surely make them stop.

-Fifteen years ago, I really give up American market.

-Besides entertainment and action, I want to educate. You know, as a producer or director, we do have a responsibility to society.

-In America there’s no way I can make the kind of movie I like to make.

-In the past when I was in Hollywood, I was like a dog. I felt humiliated. My English was not good. People would even ask me ‘Jackie Who?’.

-I asked each if [Yao Xingtong and Zhang Lanxin] was afraid of heights. Each said no, and although they had never had the action movie experience they were willing to be trained. Then I asked if they could swim, and each said yes, but she (gestures toward YX) is better. She said, I can also dive, in fact I once won a diving championship in an international competition. Then she said, “But big brother, I’m not very strong,” and I said that’s all right.

-When I’m in meetings until 5am and then have to get up two hours later for filming, sometimes I ask myself ‘why?’
I sometimes just don’t like to see the Ultimate Fighting. I just find it, as a martial artist, I just find it too violent.

-I thought I should forget Hollywood and go back to Hong Kong. I’m so lucky that finally Hollywood accepts my comedy fighting.

-I don’t want to be an action star, an action star’s life is so short. I want my life to get longer, I want my career to get longer.

-Sometimes I do need to go to karaoke, sometimes I need to relax.

-I really hope someday in Hollywood, some producer or director will hire me only to do drama.

-I just want people to remember me like I remember Buster Keaton. When they talk about Buster Keaton or Gene Kelly, people say, ‘Ah yes, they good.’ Maybe one day, they remember Jackie Chan that way.

-Some people call Police Story the greatest action film of all time, and while I have to be humble and say that I disagree, it’s definitely the favorite action film I’ve ever made.

-My affection for Taiwan… is witnessed by everyone. My wife is Taiwanese and I am a son-in-law of Taiwan. I am half Taiwanese.

-When I look at young kids today I just don’t believe it, parents take away the Gameboy and they’re suicidal. They cannot take the pressure.

-The kids never listen to you, especially the youngest ones.

-After all those years in Asia, I don’t have to do promotion anymore. We just release a Jackie Chan movie and – Boom! – people go.

-Back in the Bruce Lee era, and in my era, Kung-Fu stirred up a kind of frenzy, and many people were learning martial arts from us. But about a decade ago, Hollywood began bringing in a number of our action choreographers, including two from my own stunt crew, where they became martial arts directors. Now, a decade later, Hollywood has learned it all, so when you look at the action films they’re making now, they all use our action, our martial arts, and then add to that their own technology which is ten times better than ours, and it has to leave us dumbfounded: how did they film that?

-Everyone is saying that I’m retiring, but I want to solemnly declare, that I don’t want to retire, I just want to do things a bit less dangerous to my body, less dangerous action.

-In the past decade, there have been a lot of friends or directors, either gossiping or telling me directly, “What you’re doing now is the right thing, your main concern should be taking care of yourself, and not doing action at your age.” Well, after first feeling angry, I’d think, to be honest, I really am older. So I thought, all right, but before I retire I’d like to make one last major action film, one good one.

-The authorities should stipulate what issues people can protest over and on what issues it is not allowed.

-One thing I did pick up from Cannonball Run was the use of bloopers and outtakes under the final credits, which I’ve done in all my movies since.

-Acting keeps me young! I love that the fans like this kind of action and as long as they want me I’ll continue to do it.
Jackie Chan is a myth.