29 Quotes by James Cagney

You dirty rat...

One thing that troubles me is that they say that my portrayals of gangsters and hoodlums led to a tolerance of the criminal element by society. Well, I certainly hope they didn't, because I'm firmly opposed to crime.

If the American family has seemed in danger of disintegration, I believe and hope it will survive, and I think America will return to old values.

The 1920s were essentially the time when I learned the business of performing. It was my initiation into the world of show business.

There were many tough guys to play in the scripts that Warner kept assigning me. Each of my subsequent roles in the hoodlum genre offered the opportunity to inject something new, which I always tired to do. One could be funny, and the next one flat. Some roles were mean, and others were meaner.

It was just everyday living. With me, it was fighting, more fighting, and more fighting. Life then was simply the way it was: ordinary, not bad, not good, just regular. No stress, no strain. Of course, no one had much of anything, but we didn't know that we were poor.

Outside of my family, the prime concern of my life has been nature and its order, and how we have been savagely altering that order.

I never had the slightest difficulty with a fellow actor. Not until One, Two, Three. In that picture, Horst Buchholz tried all sorts of scene-stealing didoes. I came close to knocking him on his ass.

I got a part as a chorus girl in a show called Every Sailor and I had fun doing it. Mother didn't really approve of it, through.