Top 131 Quotes & Sayings by Daniel Day-Lewis
Explore popular quotes and sayings by a British actor Daniel Day-Lewis.
Last updated on December 23, 2024.
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.
Ireland was a place for the renewal of hope and I still see it like that.
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.
The whole thing of weight, I guess it's because there is a wider fascination we all have with weight.
I didn't like the idea of being foolish, but I learned pretty soon that it was essential to fail and be foolish.
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 had a very vivid, almost hallucinatory moment in which I was engaged in a dialogue with my father.
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 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.
I feel less often compelled to do the work than I was in the past.
You can never fully put your finger on the reason why you're suddenly, inexplicably compelled to explore one life as opposed to another.
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.
Many years ago, I really didn't know where the next work was coming from.
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.
How people are around a director, it really does affect everything, every detail of the life of the movie.
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.
Making a film, setting it up and getting it cast and getting it together, is not an easy thing.
I hate wasting people's time.
Well, we all have murderous thoughts throughout the day, if not the week.
I made the film in spite of Harvey, not because of Harvey.
I think some actors thrive on working at a much greater pace than I do.
A voice is such a deep, personal reflection of character.
How can you be a recluse in a house full of children, even if you had the inclination to be, which I don't?
Quite honestly, if I were doing work related to a living being or historical being where there was visual or audio recordings available, I would find that extremely difficult because I don't know how you would avoid the process of mimicry. And mimicry, to me at any rate, is a very dull prospect.
I have a strange relationship with time. I'm not aware of it passing.
I depleted myself to the point where I had nothing left.
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.
I'm very often still very much alive for that other being and that other world long after the film is finished.
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.
We all live under some repression; we have to, it's part of the deal.
I would wish for any one of my colleagues to have the experience of working with Martin Scorsese once in their lifetime.
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.
The last time I was on a small set would've been probably My Left Foot.
I find it easier to work when it's quiet.
There must've been some part of me that wanted to make my mark. But there was never a defining moment.
I have always been intrigued by these lives I have never experienced.
For about a year, I just didn't know what to do. I did laboring jobs, working in the docks, construction sites.
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.
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.
There's nothing worse than finding yourself in a situation, a very demanding piece of work, and knowing that you're not a true ally to the person who's in charge of all that.
I'm a little bit perverse, and I just hate doing the thing that's the most obvious.
I'm not keen on history being tampered with... to any extent.
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 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.
Everybody has to know for themselves what they're capable of.
If people take an interest in you and they think there's half a chance, they might hang on. It's dreadful.
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 suppose the place where I live is fairly remote, it would seem remote to some people.
Perhaps I'm particularly serious, because I'm not unaware of the potential absurdity of what I'm doing.
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.
I can't honestly account for the very personal response that I have to one story and not another, a sense of an orbit, the orbit of a world that draws me as my own life recedes.
My curiosity sustains me for the period of the shoot.
God knows, I haven't always been successful.
I love to sit and watch people. I love to sit and listen to people.
If you have a certain wildness of spirit, a cabinet maker's workshop is not the place to express it.
At some point in your life, if you're lucky, you get to design the way in which things evolve.
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.
Where I come from, it was a heresy to say you wanted to be in movies, leave alone American movies.
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.
At a certain age it just became apparent to me that this was probably the work that I would have to do.
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