Top 131 Quotes & Sayings by Daniel Day-Lewis - Page 2

There are always practical decisions to be made about any character you're playing.

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

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

I'm not picky, quite honestly.

It must be hard interviewing actors.

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 can't re-examine work I did in the past with pride.

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.

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

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

I've got a serious-looking head.

Germans don't speak in a German accent, they just speak German.

Very often there's this misapprehension about actors being people that need to display themselves, to reveal themselves in public.

I live in a landscape, which every single day of my life is enriching.

I'm woefully one-track-minded.

I like to learn about things.

I'm not sure you learn anything on film sets.

In all fields of creativity you see the result of work that has become habit. Where the creative impulse has become flaccid or has died out altogether, and yet because it is our work and our life we continue to do it.

I hate the domestic life.

I became conflicted in my late teens.

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.

A lot of guys in jail tattoo their hands.

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

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

I don't feel my son should pay the price for what I do.

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

When I do work, I feel the same sort of urgency as I ever did. If I didn't feel that, I don't think I would wish to be doing it. I wouldn't really see the point.

Actors should never give interviews.

I find it difficult to be in rooms now for long periods of time. I can usually take it for about an hour. Then I stride out.

I don't torture myself.

I like to cook things very slowly.

I broke things to get attention.

It didn't occur to me that it was possible to breathe life into Abraham Lincoln.

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.

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

I'd always felt very strongly in the power of vocation.

My main memories of my father are of his illness.

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

I come from not just a household but a country where the finesse of language, well-balanced sentence, structure, syntax, these things are driven into us, and my parents, bless them, are great custodians of the English language.

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.

If you have a milkshake and I have a milkshake, and I have a straw and my straw reaches across the room and starts to drink your milkshake... I drink your milkshake! I drink it up!

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

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!

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

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.

The greater your powers of self-delusion, the greater will be the apparent efficacy of this untruth.

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.

Be grateful, be grateful, be grateful.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

I have no role models. Many heroes. I have an enormous capacity for hero worship.

I spend many months in apparently listless rumination out of which I hope something will emerge.

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!

It's easy to love humanity when you're this far away from it.

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.