Daniel day-lewis quotes

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

Being at the centre of a film is a burden one takes on with innocence the first time. Thereafter, you take it on with trepidation.

Be grateful, be grateful, be grateful.

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.

For about a year, I just didn't know what to do. I did laboring jobs, working in the docks, construction sites.

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

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

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.

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.

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 don't do all of this as an indulgence. I do it because I'm not a good enough actor to not do it.

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

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!

A voice is such a deep, personal reflection of character.

I can't honestly account for the very personal response that I have to one story and not another, a sense of an orbit, the orbit of a world that draws me as my own life recedes.

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

I became conflicted in my late teens.

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.

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.

I would like to have children while I've still got the energy. But then I have the feeling that when I have children I'll stop performing in the same way, because you don't really need to perform if you have children.

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

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

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

How people are around a director, it really does affect everything, every detail of the life of the movie.

I've got a serious-looking head.

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

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

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.

It's a source of great sadness to me that my father died without having seen me do anything worthwhile. He was constantly having to make excuses for me.

I see a lot of movies. I love films as a spectator, and that's never obscured by the part of me that does the work myself. I just love going to the movies.

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

The West has always been the epicentre of possibility. One of the ways we forge against mortality is to head west. It's to do with catching the sun before it slips behind the horizon.

My main memories of my father are of his illness.

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

It must be hard interviewing actors.

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

Actors should never give interviews.

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

At a certain age it just became apparent to me that this was probably the work that I would have to do.

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

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'm not sure you learn anything on film sets.

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

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.

I like to cook things very slowly.

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.

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

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

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

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.

God knows, I haven't always been successful.

I didn't like the idea of being foolish, but I learned pretty soon that it was essential to fail and be foolish.

Perhaps I'm particularly serious, because I'm not unaware of the potential absurdity of what I'm doing.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

I've been very lucky.

I hate wasting people's time.

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

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

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

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.

I'm not picky, quite honestly.

As a member of the audience I don't like it that I can't see what's going on in the eyes and in the face and in the most subtle responses of a performer when I'm more than a few rows back. I find it very frustrating.

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

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

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

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

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

A lot of guys in jail tattoo their hands.

I'm not actually a big musical fan.

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 find it easier to work when it's quiet.

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 like to learn about things.

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

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.

The last time I was on a small set would've been probably My Left Foot.

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!

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

My life is devoted to self-delusion - and I have a great capacity for that - but it's the thing that gives me the most pleasure, so I can't complain about it.

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

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 would wish for any one of my colleagues to have the experience of working with Martin Scorsese once in their lifetime.

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

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.

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.

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

I don't torture myself. And I do the work because of the pleasure involved. I'm satisfying a compulsion I find nigh-on irresistible. It's not necessarily because of the work itself. I just feel the need for a period of regeneration afterwards. Like leaving a field fallow when you've grazed too much on it. I feel depleted.

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

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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 broke things to get attention.

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

I hate the domestic life.

The word Amendment itself is an encouraging thing, isn't it? Because an amendment, it tells of a system of government that allows for the improvement of itself. Just move forward a little bit, one day at a time.

I'm woefully one-track-minded.

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

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

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

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

My curiosity sustains me for the period of the shoot.

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

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

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.

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

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

I'm not keen on history being tampered with... to any extent.