Bill Nighy Quotes

There are only three men in the world who are licensed to wear shorts: Brad Pitt, Johnny Depp and Tom Cruise.

I hardly even leave my own house.

I generally do things I'm proud to be in and generally I'm in things people like.

I like being in kids' movies, and I like being in family movies.

Often in America people would assume that [as an English actor] you've had some sort of deep, classical training, or that you're a Shakespeare enthusiast. I have zero interest in me performing Shakespeare.

I never go on the net or the web, or whatever it's called.

From my point of view, it's very refreshing to play a regular human being and not someone from another dimension. When I say "not act," what I mean is just to be as natural and as normal as possible.

One of the reasons I like a suit is because I've never been that keen on my body. The shape a suit presents is always going to be better than anything I can do.

I find it hard to relax around any man who's got the second button on his shirt undone.

With stage, you feel completely like you're just in a bubble. I love not being able to see anything. I love coming out and I can't see anything because the lights are so bright and it's pitch black. That's ideal for me, that's when I have the best time.

It's more than usually possible that I won't do a play again. But Skylight is one of the great plays in the English language. I was lucky enough to be a part of it at one point in its life, and it's a timely thing to deliver it again in the modern world.

My dad had a personal style which was very attractive. It was quite reserved and quite elegant, and it was infectious.

I really have no interest in delivering the iambic pentameter, I just want to kill myself. I don't mind other people doing it. I say that, but really I don't want to watch other people doing it. I get embarrassed.

I know really, really famous people who are terrified every time they walk on to a stage.

I am a fan of rehearsal. I like doing it [scene] over and over and over and over until it looks like you never did it before.

I'm not a World War II buff. I know a little bit about it, I was taught the other side of the story in school, so it was unfamiliar to me, the idea of a German resistance, and yet it was considerable.

You get older and you see yourself and say, 'God, he's old, who's that?'

I used to think that prizes were damaging and divisive, until I got one, and now they seem sort of meaningful and important.

Anti-Semitism and Fascism have a long, mysterious, bewildering, poisonous and vile history and it's not exclusive to the Germans.

Never go anywhere you have to wear brown shoes.

When a movie is called 'searingly honest,' it's almost invariably grim and demonstrates how bad things can get.

One of the things that is assumed about actors is that they are extrovert, which is almost never the case, in my experience.

When I do a play, it's like agreeing to be ill for a couple of months.

One of my great regrets, and I don't have many, is that I spent too long putting people's status and reputation ahead of their more important qualities. I learned far too late in life that a long list of letters after someone's name is no guarantee of compassion, kindness, humour, all the far more relevant stuff.

I'm a jacket man. And if I'm without one, I am kind of seriously disabled. I don't know how to operate in shirt sleeves.

I'm lucky that I get to play a wide variety of parts.

I'm not a royal family watcher.

You can ruin your life wanting to be an actor.

I got briefly mistaken for someone who might be good in bed, which was very, very good.

If you ask any actor "What single thing would make you really, really happy?" Among the top five things they'd say is not having to audition anymore.

I'm always happy when actors get rich, because the odds on it are so long!

I'm not good at watching myself which I think is perfectly natural. I don't give myself a hard time about it. I am the worst critic.

I've always slightly worried the kids who play football around my house. They know I'm an actor, but felt sorry for me because they'd never seen anything I've done.

Somebody asked me recently, 'Have you done a lot of plays?' I thought hang on. I used to do nothing but plays. I've been very fortunate that on several occasions I've had jobs where I didn't want to be anywhere else in the world whatever you had to offer - however much money you've got.

If I'm going to appear in front of people I like to look my best.

You tell yourself that you're not auditioning but of course you work like crazy, and you prepare like mad. And you think, "Well, I won't get that job. But maybe they'll have another job sometime, and they'll remember that I was good."

I'm just aware of what I'm thinking and feeling but I do obviously have to get that to the back of the auditorium. So there are things like projection and filling the room, and not dropping the ends of lines - technical things which are important, but I don't think they change the way I feel in a scene.

I don't want to associate myself with any specific group of politicians.

I like American black soul music, that was my first big enthusiasm.

I'm not famous for my back story investigations; I'm lucky that I work with good writers and it's usually in the script.

Opening a play is just tough. The idea that actors are weirdly protected from it is a myth. If you imagine yourself having to spend two and a bit hours cooking bolognaise, remembering a whole major work by David Hare and speaking it at the correct moment between chopping carrots and stirring the onions in front of an audience - the normal human response is 'Please, can I go to the airport?'

One is that you legislate according to natural selection, the other is that you don't. You have compassion, you try and help people. It's a fundamental clash between two people who happen to love each other, which complicates everything.

I did pick up a guitar once, but the strings hurt my fingers so I put it down again.

The way the elderly are treated, and in some cases warehoused and medicated, rather than nurtured and listened to, is distressing.

If you ever see me in a social setting wearing any sort of sportswear, then you know I'm in crisis.

I guess part of the hit-man appeal is the solitude. Everybody is lured to the idea of the solitary life.

It can't be overstated how wonderful it is not to have to audition any more. Any actor will tell you, it's like Christmas.

I have a perfectly average skewed perception of myself. We often don't know what we're like.