Top 50 Daniel Day-Lewis Quotes

I hate the domestic life.

I broke things to get attention.

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’m not sure you learn anything on film sets.

Actors should never give interviews.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

I’m woefully one-track-minded.

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

I have always been intrigued by these lives I have never experienced.

I feel less often compelled to do the work than I was in the past.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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 certain wildness of spirit, a cabinet maker’s workshop is not the place to express it.

I made the film in spite of Harvey, not because of Harvey.

I had a very vivid, almost hallucinatory moment in which I was engaged in a dialogue with my father.

How can you be a recluse in a house full of children, even if you had the inclination to be, which I don’t?

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

I don’t torture myself.

I like to cook things very slowly.

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

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.

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

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’m a warrior when it comes to pursuing roles.

God knows, I haven’t always been successful.

I like to learn about things.

I suppose the place where I live is fairly remote, it would seem remote to some people.

I’m very often still very much alive for that other being and that other world long after the film is finished.

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 still relate to my father very much. I mean, I talk to him in a certain way, as we do talk to the dead.

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.

The whole thing of weight, I guess it’s because there is a wider fascination we all have with weight.

Ireland was a place for the renewal of hope and I still see it like that.

Well, we all have murderous thoughts throughout the day, if not the week.

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.

I’ve been very lucky.

I hate wasting people’s time.

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