“The best thing about acting is that I get to lose myself in another character and actually get paid for it. It’s a great outlet. As for myself, I’m not sure who I am. It seems that I change every day.”

“People want you to be a crazy, out-of-control teen brat. They want you miserable, just like them. They don’t want heroes; what they want is to see you fall.”

“You can either be a vain movie star, or you can try to shed some light on different aspects of the human condition.”

“It’s a really obvious thing to say, but the more people know too much about who you really are, and it’s a fundamental thing, the more the mystery is taken away from the artist, and the harder it is for people to believe that person in a particular role.”

[On fame]: “As soon as enough people give you enough compliments and you’re wielding more power than you’ve ever had in your life, it’s not that you become an arrogant little prick, or become rude to people… but you get a false sense of your own importance and what you’ve accomplished. You actually think you’ve altered the course of history.”

“I don’t really have many extravagances. I don’t fly private jets and I don’t have bodyguards and I don’t buy crazy things. I have a couple of houses here and there. I bought a very expensive watch, and I am going to buy a really expensive movie poster, the original for The Thief of Bagdad (1940). I love movie posters.”

“The great thing about turning 30 in this business is that you get to perpetuate being young or old as long as we want.”

[On whether there are any aspects of fame he dislikes]: “You kidding? I feel very fortunate. A lot of people would love to be in my position. There are so many people out there who are suffering trillions of times more than I could ever suffer, and would love to be me. I am a lucky little bastard.”

“Yes, I can play younger than my age. But I can play characters older than I am, too. I’m not an actor who can just play the kid.”

“I think people read the tabloids because they want to see you eating a burger, or out of your makeup or doing something stupid because they just want to see that you’re like everyone else. And that’s OK. I don’t want to catch myself anymore saying that my life is hard, because the good far outweighs the bad in my life. And it’s easier to focus on those things, on the things that are important.”

“You learn after you’ve been in the business for a while that it’s not getting your face recognized that’s the payoff. It’s having your film remembered.”

“I lived in Hollywood and, ironically, I didn’t know you could just go out and get an agent and go on auditions and try and become an actor, I thought it was like a Masonic thing, like a blood line you had to belong to – until I was 13. Then I realised what you had to do. It is the one thing I know I want to do for the rest of my life.”

“I was behind a woman at the checkout counter who was looking at the magazines. She turned to me and goes, ‘There he is again, that Leonardo DiCaprio. Don’t you wish he’d just disappear?’ I said (to myself), this is the moment where I either go, ‘Do you know who I am?’ or put my hat further down, pay for my corn-nuts and get out of there… I choose to avoid that.”

“My first date was with a girl named Cessi. We’d had a beautiful relationship over the phone all summer long. Then she came home and we met to go out for the first time to the movies. When I saw her I was petrified. I couldn’t even look her in the eye to talk to her.”

“I don’t know if I’m ever getting married. I’m probably not going to get married unless I live with somebody for 10 or 20 years. But these people took a chance and they did it. We don’t have the guts that Romeo did.”

“As a little kid growing up in Hollywood, I was called ‘a little crazy’. And now I guess I’m still that way.”

“I cheated a lot, because I just couldn’t sit and do homework. I usually sat next to someone extremely smart.”

“I’m not really the quiet type, although some people think I am. But I’m the rebel type in the sense that I don’t think I’m like everyone else. I try to be an individual.”

“I like to help the whales, the otters, and the dolphins. When I’m acting and I take a break, the first thing on my list is spending time by the sea.”

“I insist on keeping a level head. I’ve maintained the same exact home life that I’ve had for 20 years. All I see is more people looking at me than before. But, you know, who cares? You just can’t obsess yourself with this fame stuff.”

“My mom and I lived at Hollywood and Western, a drug-dealer and prostitute corner. It was pretty terrifying. I got beat up a lot. I saw people have sex in the alleys. I remember I was 5 years old, and this guy with a trench coat, needles and crack cornered me. Early on, seeing the devastation on my block, seeing heroin addicts, made me think twice about ever getting involved in drugs. It’s evil. Once you take that step and experiment, drugs can take over your life. You are not yourself anymore. That’s something I never wanted. I didn’t have a lot of friends growing up. It was kind of just me and my parents. But because of them, the neighborhood did not have a bad effect on me. My dad introduced me to artists, and every few months we’d go to some hippie doo-dah parade as Mudmen in our underwear, carrying sticks and covered in mud. My mother did everything to get me into the best schools she could find.”

“When a role for a young guy is being offered to me, I think of River Phoenix. It feels like a loss.”

“When I was young, I used to have this thing where I wanted to see everything. I used to think, ‘How can I die without seeing every inch of this world?’”

“What I would do in order to be popular was, I’d put myself on line and joke around and be funny, and I was always known as the crazy kid.”

“Bridget Hall and I hung out for a week. The whole thing was blown out of proportion.”

“I like girls who are intelligent, somewhat funny, and pretty with a nice personality.”

“It’s a weird adjustment living alone, because you don’t realize how much you really miss Mumsie until she’s not there.”

“Dark green is my favorite color. It’s the color of nature and the color of money and the color of moss!”

“I’m absolutely clean. I’ve never tried anything. That’s not a lie!”

“I’m not the sort of person who tries to be cool or trendy. I’m definitely an individual.”

“I don’t have emotions about a lot of things. I rarely get angry, I rarely cry. I guess I do get excited a lot, but I don’t get sad and enormously happy. I think a lot of people who talk about all that crap are lying. Right now I’m just trying to maintain happiness — that’s all I really care about. Anyway, when you’re my age and your hormones are kicking in, there’s not much besides sex that’s on your mind.”

“I hate speaking in front of a large audience. I don’t know where it came from… but it’s just this gut-wrenching fear of slipping up and doing something horrible.”

“One of my passions is to meet people and then imitate them. I love doing that.”

“I have the same problem as Edward Furlong. I’m so thin!”

“I’m nothing like Romeo in real life.”

“I’m shy, but when the time comes to be wild, I’m fun-loving, adventurous, and mysterious.”

“It’s tricky stuff. If you’re not perfect in every film, then people say ‘see, he was just lucky in one role’.”

[On his career]: “I admit I’ve done a few lousy roles in the beginning of my career, like my role in Critters 3. But at that age, you’ll do anything for attention!”

“Everywhere I go, somebody is staring at me. I don’t know if people are staring because they recognize me or because they think I’m a weirdo.”

“People always like to make up stories. I am not planning on getting married. Then again, I might wake up tomorrow and decide to get married!”

“If you hear of any incident about me — a fight, a change of clothes, a little extra gel in the hair, don’t believe it till you talk to me.”

“I hate being selected as ‘Babe of the Month’ and being called ‘hunk’.”

“Fame is not the worst thing. I went to dinner the other night, and the girls in the restaurant ignored me. It was so annoying.”

“My God, no! I hate this whole hunk thing! I feel when I see myself in that, and these other cute faces, that I’m just part of this meat factory, like, ‘Wow! Here’s the hunk of the month! This month we’re shoving Leonardo DiCaprio down your throat! Isn’t he cute. Let’s put him on the cover and we’ll sell so many more magazines…’ That’s definitely not what I want to be, and I’ve tried real hard to get away from that whole situation.”

“If you can do what you do best and be happy, you’re further along in life than most people.”

“The main thing for me right now is just to live my life with my family and friends. They treat me like Leo, not ‘Leonardo, Master Thespian’. That’s all I need to keep my sanity.”

“The last thing I want to turn into is a fat Hollywood jerk. I was brought up without much money and I was happy. I don’t think that I will strive for money or success and end up greedy or big-headed. That only leads to unhappiness. I can still be down-to-earth and do this job as long as I enjoy it.”

[On success]: “I’ve just been jolting along from one film to another… Now, it’s sort of a shock to realize what I’ve achieved.”

“Portraying emotionally ill characters gives me the chance to really act.”

“I’m just starting to scratch the surface of what makes me happy, and it has taken me a while to admit that acting like a child and a jerk is fun.”

[On acting]: “Don’t think for a moment that I’m really like any of the characters I play. That’s why it’s called acting.”

“In this business nothing is as dangerous and as feared as loneliness. You shoot films in the most remote areas of the world; you’re separated from your family and your friends. And at some point you’re in your hotel room looking at yourself in the mirror and you realize how lonely you are and how far you are from leading a normal life. That is quite a punch in the gut.”

“I respect Russian culture and Russian cinema, especially Eisenstein, (Andrei) Tarkovsky, and Sergei Parajanov.”

“I was 18 when I got to work with Meryl [Streep]. I remember going over my lines with her off camera, looking at her and thinking to myself, ‘What is going on here? How is this going to look good?’ Then when I sat in the theater, it was, ‘Oh, my God, she’s the only person who looks completely natural. Meryl may be the greatest actor in the world.”

“Out of any actor, I can’t think of anyone who’s got more memorable moments in cinema than Jack Nicholson. Jack never takes a single line straight on. Never takes an emotion written in the script at face value. He brings terror into what you thought was supposed to be a light moment and makes a light moment out of a cutthroat vicious line. He flips everything on its side.”

“I want to be an actor just like my role models. Robert De Niro, for example. Being discreet in his private life has allowed him to be even more credible in different roles on the big screen.”

“During Gilbert Grape I didn’t know where I was gonna go as an actor so I didn’t know what types of movies I wanted to do. I just felt like doing a movie is doing a movie. I get money and fame, and that’s great, and I can act and have fun. And I was up for a movie called Hocus Pocus with Bette Midler, and I knew it was awful, but it was just like, ‘Okay, they’re offering me more and more money. Isn’t that what you do? You do movies and you get more and more money.’ But something inside of me kept saying, ‘Don’t do this movie.’ And everyone around me was saying, ‘Leonardo, how could you not take a movie?’ And I said to myself, ‘Okay, I’ll audition for this movie Gilbert Grape. If I don’t get that, I’ll do Hocus Pocus.’ I found myself trying so hard, investing so much time and energy in Gilbert Grape, I worked so damn hard at it and I finally got it, and it was like such a weight off my shoulders.”

“I prefer ordinary girls — you know, college students, waitresses, that sort of thing. Most of the girls I go out with are just good friends. Just because I go out to the cinema with a girl, it doesn’t mean we are dating.”

“The first kiss I had was the most disgusting thing in my life. The girl injected about a pound of saliva into my mouth, and when I walked away I had to spit it all out.”

“When you’re my age and your hormones are kicking in there’s not much besides sex that’s on your mind. I do believe in love at first sight, though it hasn’t happened to me yet.”

“I don’t see why I can’t have friends of both sexes without wild rumors being circulated. It’s crazy.”

“With Romeo and Juliet, you’re talking about two people who meet one night, and get married the same night. I believe in love at first sight – but it hasn’t happened to me yet.”