Daniel Day-Lewis
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.
Where I come from, it was a heresy to say you wanted to be in movies, leave alone American movies.
One of the great privileges of having grown up in a middle-class literary English household, but having gone to school in the front lines in Southeast London, was that I became half-street-urchin and half-good-boy at home. I knew that dichotomy was possible.
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.
I'm a little bit perverse, and I just hate doing the thing that's the most obvious.
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.
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.
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.
Well, we all have murderous thoughts throughout the day, if not the week.
Acting is about people. Other people. Otherwise, you're not acting, you're doing monologues.Collection: People
The more articulate somebody is, the more suspicious I am of them. I like to feel that the important things remain unsaid.Collection: Silence
I am more greatly moved by people who struggle to express themselves...I prefer the abstract concept of incoherence in the face of great feeling to beautiful, full sentences that convey little emotion.Collection: Beautiful
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.Collection: Believe
I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed. I hate most people.Collection: Hate
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.Collection: Sadness
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 toward it.Collection: Taken
I don’t like to rehearse. And I couldn’t understand how you could go through eight weeks of rehearsal, without exhausting every possibility. To the point where, you know, you would just lie gasping on the floor!Collection: Lying
Making a film, setting it up and getting it cast and getting it together, is not an easy thingCollection: Fog
You don't merely give over your creativity to making a film - you give over your life! In theatre, by contrast, you live these two rather strange lives simultaneously; you have no option but to confront the mould on last night's washing-up.Collection: Creativity
The theater is a need for me. It's a terrible attraction, something I'm compelled to do. And one derives a form of nourishment from the theater which you can never get from films. Making films weakens you in some way. With the theater, the work itself is a regenerative process.Collection: Film
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.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Moving
I suppose that anyone who does any kind of creative work some time in their life - especially as you grow into middle age! - you come to a time where you really question more and more frequently, whether you have anything else to offer. And at its worst, you feel utterly bereft of whatever creative force it takes to do that work.Collection: Creative
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!Collection: Romantic
I don't do all of this as an indulgence. I do it because I'm not a good enough actor to not do it.Collection: Good Enough
It's easy to love humanity when you're this far away from it.Collection: Humanity
I spend many months in apparently listless rumination out of which I hope something will emerge.Collection: Rumination
My life is devoted to self-delusion - and I have a great capacity for that - but it's the thing that gives me the most pleasure, so I can't complain about it.Collection: Giving
The greater your powers of self-delusion, the greater will be the apparent efficacy of this untruth.Collection: Untruth
Be grateful, be grateful, be grateful.Collection: Grateful
I have no role models. Many heroes. I have an enormous capacity for hero worship.Collection: Hero
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 on the details that are not at all at the centre of the work.Collection: Talking
You've just provided me with the makings of one hell of a weekend in Dublin.Collection: Weekend
I don't torture myself. And I do the work because of the pleasure involved. I'm satisfying a compulsion I find nigh-on irresistible. It's not necessarily because of the work itself. I just feel the need for a period of regeneration afterwards. Like leaving a field fallow when you've grazed too much on it. I feel depleted.Collection: Torture
I had a very vivid, almost hallucinatory moment in which I was engaged in a dialogue with my father...Collection: Father
I'm not actually a big musical fan.Collection: Musical
I'm very often still very much alive for that other being and that other world long after the film is finishedCollection: Other Worlds
When it comes to parenthood everyone thinks they will be terrible at it. We don't think we have it in us. Then you find out that you do, which truly is a miracle in life.Collection: Thinking
I would like to have children while I've still got the energy. But then I have the feeling that when I have children I'll stop performing in the same way, because you don't really need to perform if you have children.Collection: Children