Daniel Day-Lewis Quotes

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.

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 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.

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

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 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!

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.

I have a strange relationship with time. I'm not aware of it passing.

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.

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.

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

My main memories of my father are of his illness.

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

There must've been some part of me that wanted to make my mark. But there was never a defining moment.

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.

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!

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

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

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.

I like to learn about things.

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.

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

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

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

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

Everybody has to know for themselves what they're capable of.

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.

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.

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

Be grateful, be grateful, be grateful.

I love to sit and watch people. I love to sit and listen to people.

I've got a serious-looking head.

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

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

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

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.

You can never fully put your finger on the reason why you're suddenly, inexplicably compelled to explore one life as opposed to another.

I've been very lucky.

I'm not picky, quite honestly.

My curiosity sustains me for the period of the shoot.

I became conflicted in my late teens.

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.

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

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

Where I come from, it was a heresy to say you wanted to be in movies, leave alone American movies.

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