Daniel Day-Lewis Quotations

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 think I have a strange relationship with time. I'm not really aware of that time passing. I don't feel that I'm wasteful with time. But I'm not aware of it passing.

To people who don't know me I'm defined by a number of things that people know about me that are entirely untrue.

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.'

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

We all live under some repression; we have to, it's part of the deal.

A lot of guys in jail tattoo their hands.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

If people take an interest in you and they think there's half a chance, they might hang on. It's dreadful.

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

My curiosity sustains me for the period of the shoot.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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 find it easier to work when it's quiet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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.

It must be hard interviewing actors.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

I hate wasting people's time.

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

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.

I hate the domestic life.

I don't torture myself.

I became conflicted in my late teens.

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

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 broke things to get attention.

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

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.

God knows, I haven't always been successful.

My main memories of my father are of his illness.

I like to cook things very slowly.

I like to learn about things.

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

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

I've been very lucky.

I'm not actually a big musical fan.

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

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

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'm a warrior when it comes to pursuing roles.

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