Daniel Day-Lewis Quotes

I never retreat from films, as it were, I simply indulge in other interests, that's all.

I like things that make you grit your teeth. I like tucking my chin in and sort of leading into the storm. I like that feeling. I like it a lot.

It must be hard interviewing actors.

England is obsessed with where you came from, and they are determined to keep you in that place, be it in a drawing room or in the gutter.

When I did make the decision to focus on acting, I think my mother was just relieved for me that I had finally started to focus.

Periodically over the years I've always taken periods of time away from acting.

I find it easier to work when it's quiet.

I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed. I hate most people.

You've just provided me with the makings of one hell of a weekend in Dublin.

The West has always been the epicentre of possibility. One of the ways we forge against mortality is to head west. It's to do with catching the sun before it slips behind the horizon.

To people who don't know me I'm defined by a number of things that people know about me that are entirely untrue.

We all live under some repression; we have to, it's part of the deal.

My preference is that, that day when someone sticks a tripod in front of you with a camera on the top, it is not day one.

I have always been intrigued by these lives I have never experienced.

As a member of the audience I don't like it that I can't see what's going on in the eyes and in the face and in the most subtle responses of a performer when I'm more than a few rows back. I find it very frustrating.

It is awesome to feel you are carrying on the family name.

I had a very vivid, almost hallucinatory moment in which I was engaged in a dialogue with my father.

As actors, we're all encouraged to feel that each job is the last job. They plant some little electrode in your head at an early stage and you think, 'Be grateful, be grateful, be grateful.'

I made the film in spite of Harvey, not because of Harvey.

Films exhaust me, they do, and I often want nothing more to do with them, but I'm continually surprised at the resurgence of the impulse to come back and do it all over again.

At some point in your life, if you're lucky, you get to design the way in which things evolve.

Film has become such a central part of our culture now that I think sometimes too great a weight is placed upon it in terms of scrutiny and analysis. There's a lot of rather specious professorial stuff that swirls around films.

God knows, I haven't always been successful.

Just stay alive, no matter what occurs! I will find you. No matter how long it takes, no matter how far. I will find you!

The more articulate somebody is, the more suspicious I am of them. I like to feel that the important things remain unsaid.

I'm not picky, quite honestly.

My main memories of my father are of his illness.

I don't torture myself.

I like to learn about things.

The word Amendment itself is an encouraging thing, isn't it? Because an amendment, it tells of a system of government that allows for the improvement of itself. Just move forward a little bit, one day at a time.

I still relate to my father very much. I mean, I talk to him in a certain way, as we do talk to the dead.

I'm not actually a big musical fan.

I'm not really a storyteller myself - I tend to get all tangled up when I try and tell stories.

A voice is such a deep, personal reflection of character.

When I've gone back to work, it's always with that sense of inevitability. That may be a complete delusion, but it's the one that I need to get out of bed and go about my business. That sense that I can't avoid this thing. I better just get on with it.

I'm a little bit perverse, and I just hate doing the thing that's the most obvious.

Well, we all have murderous thoughts throughout the day, if not the week.

For about a year, I just didn't know what to do. I did laboring jobs, working in the docks, construction sites.

I've been very lucky.

I see a lot of movies. I love films as a spectator, and that's never obscured by the part of me that does the work myself. I just love going to the movies.

Making a film, setting it up and getting it cast and getting it together, is not an easy thing.

For as long as I can remember, the thing that gave me a sense of wonderment and renewal ... has always been the work of other actors.

I don't deal at all well with the relative amount of stuff I have to face already.

I don't know what impression you might have of the way I live. I live in a quiet place. I do not live as a hermit, though other people would prefer it if I did.

Being at the centre of a film is a burden one takes on with innocence the first time. Thereafter, you take it on with trepidation.

If you remain unsettled by a piece of writing, it means you are not watching the story from the outside; you've already taken a step towards it.

I'm a warrior when it comes to pursuing roles.

It's a source of great sadness to me that my father died without having seen me do anything worthwhile. He was constantly having to make excuses for me.

Many years ago, I really didn't know where the next work was coming from.

Acting is about people. Other people. Otherwise, you're not acting, you're doing monologues.

I didn't like the idea of being foolish, but I learned pretty soon that it was essential to fail and be foolish.

I suppose it's a very highly developed form of denial, but some part of me completely denies that I'm a performer.

I avoid talking about the way I work. But in avoiding it I seem only to have encouraged people to focus their fantasies about me in an ever more fantastical way.

My curiosity sustains me for the period of the shoot.

I think some actors thrive on working at a much greater pace than I do.

When I was younger, I made some decisions that I shouldn't have. And, in hindsight, I've almost always been wrong when I haven't listened to myself.

I think I have a strange relationship with time. I'm not really aware of that time passing. I don't feel that I'm wasteful with time. But I'm not aware of it passing.

I hate wasting people's time.

Perhaps I'm particularly serious, because I'm not unaware of the potential absurdity of what I'm doing.

Shoes are strange things. If you take your shoes off in a situation in which you're vulnerable, you'll feel 10 times more vulnerable.

I suppose I have a highly developed capacity for self-delusion, so it's no problem for me to believe that I'm somebody else!

I suppose the place where I live is fairly remote, it would seem remote to some people.

If you have a certain wildness of spirit, a cabinet maker's workshop is not the place to express it.

I just knew at an early time in my life how important privacy was.

If people take an interest in you and they think there's half a chance, they might hang on. It's dreadful.

I was a savage for so many years of my life. There was some seed of determination in me that I was not conscious of. I was mostly consciously getting into trouble and drunk.

The one thing that I appear to have been given, bearing in mind that I am capable of being very, very scatty and extremely lazy, is the ability to concentrate on something I choose to give my time to.

I depleted myself to the point where I had nothing left.

Actors should never give interviews.

Leaving a role is a terrible sadness. The last day of the shooting is surreal. Your soul, your body and your mind are not ready at all to see the end of this experience. In the following months after a film shoot, one feels a deep sense of void.