Top 101 Peter Capaldi Quotes

Real heroes are all around us and uncelebrated.

What annoys me about it is that your fate is always in somebody else’s hands. It’s always up to somebody else to decide whether or not they want you in their show and so the majority of actors have to play out a waiting game. The constant fear is that it could all end tomorrow.

I think the nice thing about ‘Doctor Who’ is whether people like it or don’t like it, somewhere, someone loves you and will always love you – and the more everyone hates you, the more they’ll love you.

I suppose I just like being arty. That’s all. Arty.

Nowadays, kids… young actors… they go straight to L.A. before they’ve even done anything.

I think all actors experience ups and downs.

I have a fairly normal domestic life.

I went to art school in the days when it was what you did if you didn’t want to be like everybody else. You wanted to be strange and different, and art school encouraged that. We hated the drama students – they were guys with pipes and cardigans.

I think it’s not misplaced in ‘Doctor Who’ to have someone who is little bit edgy and maybe a little volatile and dangerous.

The best advice is to get on with it. I’m very prone to falling into depressions – not clinical, just ‘can’t be bothered.’ It’s such a waste of time.

I like the constant rise and fall of the British film industry. But above all, I like the workhorses who kept going no matter what.

The thing that runs through the British film industry even today is a lot of unsung movies are financially the bigger ones. Even though they weren’t always the greatest of movies, something in them was very potent which people loved.

At 17 years old, STG took me under its wing and shared its resources and wisdom with me, even allowing me to take part in a show at the Edinburgh Festival. Without STG and the Ramshorn Theatre, I would not have found access to the world of drama that I later made my profession.

Maybe it’s because I’ve been an actor for such a long time, but I think, unless you’re a big star, you don’t really have much control over anything. I’ve never been able to make any plans.

I spent four months once doing a play on Broadway.

I could never plan to have a career that went this well… you know, there were times when it didn’t: when it went into the toilet, or ducked, or was difficult to get moving.

I never really think of acting and directing as being separate; they are just different expressions of the same thing.

I didn’t want to be Doctor Who in a ‘Doctor Who’ that I didn’t like.

What you’re doing is acting with yourself. Well, I’m my favourite actor, so in a way it’s quite straightforward for me.

‘Doctor Who’ has a certain amount of showbiz attached to it.

Shouting at people keeps you alive, healthy, young, fresh.

I could make the title of my memoirs: ‘It’s got cinematic disaster written all over it.’

Believe it or not, one teacher used to call me a giant spastic for not being able to play football.

One of the problems with episodic television of any color is that everything has got to be okay at the end of the episode so it can start again next week.

Everywhere I go, I am The Doctor, and everyone smiles at me – they are pleased to see Doctor Who, who’s far more exciting than I am.

The difference between movies and TV is that in TV you have to have a trauma every week, but that event may not be the biggest event in the characters’ lives.

‘Strictly Sinatra’ became a compromise between me and the producers, and neither of us liked the results much.

There are only a handful of really good TV programmes, and I’m blessed to be in one of them.

When I first came to London, I loved hanging around in cafes, smoking, scribbling, dreaming. It was life-affirming and fun.

My adolescence was a kind of motorway pile-up. I wish I had known that one day the geek would inherit the Earth.

I’m creative. I can’t relax unless I’ve got some project on the go. I’m somebody from art school, and art school during the punk era, when you just had a go at whatever came along.

I love people where, at the end of the day, they’ll pick up a paintbrush and paint clouds. They can physically make things.

We don’t consider the Wizard of Oz or Father Christmas to be too old. They’re still magical characters, and the fact they’ve been around the block only adds to their magic.

I’m not saying that all politicians are awful. I don’t know any of them well enough to say whether they’re awful or not. But almost every day, you find out something about them that’s appalling. Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised any longer.

If you put me in a real Tardis, I dread to think what would happen to the universe.

I wouldn’t be here if it were not for the grant system that paid for me to go to art school – because my parents couldn’t have afforded it.

If you travel in time and space, most of the people you know and love will eventually be gone. But you’ll also be able to go and find them again.

I’m so lucky to have worked with Burt Lancaster, who I remember was one of the first people I’d heard swearing in a really interesting way.

Recently, I dreamed that I returned home to find my wife had married Ray Winstone. They were kind and let me stay, but the whole thing was awkward.

You can’t, as an actor, conduct yourself by making constant references to other people.

I don’t want to find myself at the age of 60 waiting by the telephone for someone else to decide if I am capable of being in what might be a crummy TV production.

My family know not to get me any tech for Christmas. I can never get it to work, and it all becomes very tearful and pressurised.

Even if I hadn’t been cast as Doctor Who, my acting would probably have been influenced by William Hartnell or Patrick Troughton, Jon Pertwee, Tom Baker, and all of the other guys. Because those were the actors that I really watched every moment of, as opposed to Laurence Olivier.

I’m just physically stupid.

There is no such thing as too much swearing. Swearing is just a piece of linguistic mechanics. The words in-between are the clever ones.

Why can’t jazz musicians just leave a melody alone?

My parents didn’t take me to the theatre to see Chekhov when I was growing up – we went to see ‘Francie and Josie’ once every five years.

Once you reach a certain age, you find yourself visiting hospitals a lot.

I absolutely hate mowing the lawn. When I hear the mowers starting, I want to kill myself: it’s the sound of death approaching. Hoovering’s OK, but I never in my life wanted to have a lawn and certainly never wanted to mow one.

The biggest thing I have realized was that you have to choose your collaborators very carefully, and that not everybody can like you. The process of filmmaking is so difficult, there’s no point in doing it unless you can do it the way you want.

The nurses’ job is emotional and distressing. Their day-to-day work is dealing with people withering and falling to pieces. So black humour is essential for them cope with that. It’s just a consequence of their environment.

One year was so bad for me and my wife that we were going to have to sell our house until Elaine decided to change career and earn some money.

I love these sort of documentaries, which you might turn on late on a Saturday night – like, say, ‘The Alma Cogan Story.’ But they are ripe for spoofing, because the presenters are always so serious and anxious to make themselves look like rather attractive and interesting people.

Before ‘Local Hero,’ I’d been knocking about Glasgow in rock bands, drinking too much and generally being 21. My opinion of actors was that they were straight and boring, so you see, I was completely unprepared for being one.

A girl once came to my beery flat in Kensal Green, opened the blinds and cooked me breakfast. I married her.

Being asked to play ‘The Doctor’ is an amazing privilege. Like the Doctor himself I find myself in a state of utter terror and delight. I can’t wait to get started.

I hated improvisation because in my early days as an actor, improvisation meant somebody had just come down from Oxford and they were doing a play above a pub in Kentish Town, and the biggest ego would win.

The big reason that ‘Doctor Who’ is still with us is that every single viewer who ever turned in to watch this show, at any age, at any time in its history, took it into their heart – because ‘Doctor Who’ belongs to all of us. Everyone made ‘Doctor Who.’

The biggest problem of all is that it’s very difficult to tell my daughter, ‘Swearing is not clever or funny,’ because I earn a living by swearing.

I turn down invitations to events where I know there will be politicians.

I think the periods of being unsuccessful have made me a better actor.

I haven’t played Doctor Who since I was 9 on the playground.

I got into music, I was in a band, I was at art school. I was quite trendy, although I’d hate to meet myself. The over-preening, the pretentiousness, the arrogance of youth! I think, ‘Oh, that guy was so full of himself.’

I know what ‘Doctor Who’ fans are like because I am a ‘Doctor Who’ fan myself. They’re good people.