Minefield Quotes

When you are a second-generation success, you are provided for. And that certainly was a big opportunity. But you don`t have that `rags-to-riches story`, which is always a much more dramatic story to plot. Your success is not one that is as easily accepted by the people outside. Or they don`t really have an appreciation of what you have accomplished. As a producer, my successes came fairly early in my career; as an actor, they came much later. Winning the Academy Award for Wall Street (1987) really helped me to finally overcome that `second generation` thing. It`s hard for people, no matter how generous and gracious they are, to really allow you any slack. They say, `Oh it must have been hard to be Kirk Douglas` son,` but they don`t really want to accept it. You grow up in this business and all that means is that you don`t get the joy of succeeding. If you succeed, it`s expected. If you look around you can see that there are hardly any second-generation people that have succeeded at all. It`s a minefield of disasters, of broken careers and self-destruction out there. The public`s perception is that you didn`t have to do anything. So if you succeed, it`s just assumed. If you don`t get success, you`re an asshole like everybody else.

On producing The Bucket List (2007): This is kind of a little minefield here. You want to get the tone right for it. This is a subject that you have to deal with comically. It`s still got to be funny. You want sentiment, not sentimentality. These are all the sidewalls you want to not fracture the picture on. Not that I don`t like an easy job.

Everything rides on Dec. 3. This fight is important because that`s where Bernard Hopkins will show that anyone who went through the minefield again with him is in trouble. I`ve beaten everyone who got into the ring with me a second time, and some of them I sent into retirement. I have to deal with the clouds and the storm. You think you got me down and I rise up.

Even if a minefield or the abyss should lie before me, I will march straight ahead without looking back.

You never really know the person you’re sleeping beside. You have a right to your secrets, but that’s very difficult when you’re supposed to be someone’s partner. - On marriage as a minefield of secrets, as suggested in Married Life