Daniel Day-Lewis Quotes & Sayings

I find it easier to work when it's quiet. — Daniel Day-Lewis

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

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

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. — Daniel Day-Lewis

I think some actors thrive on working at a much greater pace than I do. — Daniel Day-Lewis

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. — Daniel Day-Lewis

I just knew at an early time in my life how important privacy was. — Daniel Day-Lewis

I've been very lucky. — Daniel Day-Lewis

A voice is such a deep, personal reflection of character. — Daniel Day-Lewis

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. — Daniel Day-Lewis

I depleted myself to the point where I had nothing left. — Daniel Day-Lewis

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. — Daniel Day-Lewis

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. — Daniel Day-Lewis

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. — Daniel Day-Lewis

I don't feel my son should pay the price for what I do. — Daniel Day-Lewis

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. — Daniel Day-Lewis

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

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

I can't re-examine work I did in the past with pride. — Daniel Day-Lewis

How people are around a director, it really does affect everything, every detail of the life of the movie. — Daniel Day-Lewis

I would wish for any one of my colleagues to have the experience of working with Martin Scorsese once in their lifetime. — Daniel Day-Lewis

Periodically over the years I've always taken periods of time away from acting. — Daniel Day-Lewis

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. — Daniel Day-Lewis

There are always practical decisions to be made about any character you're playing. — Daniel Day-Lewis

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. — Daniel Day-Lewis

I'm not picky, quite honestly. — Daniel Day-Lewis

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. — Daniel Day-Lewis

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. — Daniel Day-Lewis

Well, we all have murderous thoughts throughout the day, if not the week. — Daniel Day-Lewis

I love to sit and watch people. I love to sit and listen to people. — Daniel Day-Lewis

I'm a little bit perverse, and I just hate doing the thing that's the most obvious. — Daniel Day-Lewis

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! — Daniel Day-Lewis

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

Actors should never give interviews. — Daniel Day-Lewis

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. — Daniel Day-Lewis

I made the film in spite of Harvey, not because of Harvey. — Daniel Day-Lewis

I spend many months in apparently listless rumination out of which I hope something will emerge. — Daniel Day-Lewis

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. — Daniel Day-Lewis

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. — Daniel Day-Lewis

It's easy to love humanity when you're this far away from it. — Daniel Day-Lewis

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

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! — Daniel Day-Lewis

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. — Daniel Day-Lewis

How can you be a recluse in a house full of children, even if you had the inclination to be, which I don't? — Daniel Day-Lewis

You've just provided me with the makings of one hell of a weekend in Dublin. — Daniel Day-Lewis

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. — Daniel Day-Lewis

I never retreat from films, as it were, I simply indulge in other interests, that's all. — Daniel Day-Lewis

Many years ago, I really didn't know where the next work was coming from. — Daniel Day-Lewis

I'm woefully one-track-minded. — Daniel Day-Lewis

I feel less often compelled to do the work than I was in the past. — Daniel Day-Lewis

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. — Daniel Day-Lewis

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. — Daniel Day-Lewis

I'm not actually a big musical fan. — Daniel Day-Lewis

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! — Daniel Day-Lewis

It is awesome to feel you are carrying on the family name. — Daniel Day-Lewis

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. — Daniel Day-Lewis

I like to cook things very slowly. — Daniel Day-Lewis

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. — Daniel Day-Lewis

I have always been intrigued by these lives I have never experienced. — Daniel Day-Lewis

I'm not keen on history being tampered with ... to any extent. — Daniel Day-Lewis

We all live under some repression; we have to, it's part of the deal. — Daniel Day-Lewis

Germans don't speak in a German accent, they just speak German. — Daniel Day-Lewis

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. — Daniel Day-Lewis

I'm not sure you learn anything on film sets. — Daniel Day-Lewis

Perhaps I'm particularly serious, because I'm not unaware of the potential absurdity of what I'm doing. — Daniel Day-Lewis

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.' — Daniel Day-Lewis

It didn't occur to me that it was possible to breathe life into Abraham Lincoln. — Daniel Day-Lewis

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! — Daniel Day-Lewis

I had a very vivid, almost hallucinatory moment in which I was engaged in a dialogue with my father. — Daniel Day-Lewis

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. — Daniel Day-Lewis

I'm very often still very much alive for that other being and that other world long after the film is finished. — Daniel Day-Lewis

I'd always felt very strongly in the power of vocation. — Daniel Day-Lewis

I broke things to get attention. — Daniel Day-Lewis

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. — Daniel Day-Lewis

It must be hard interviewing actors. — Daniel Day-Lewis

I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed. I hate most people. — Daniel Day-Lewis

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

My main memories of my father are of his illness. — Daniel Day-Lewis

I live in a landscape, which every single day of my life is enriching. — Daniel Day-Lewis

Ireland was a place for the renewal of hope and I still see it like that. — Daniel Day-Lewis

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

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. — Daniel Day-Lewis

I don't deal at all well with the relative amount of stuff I have to face already. — Daniel Day-Lewis

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. — Daniel Day-Lewis

Everybody has to know for themselves what they're capable of. — Daniel Day-Lewis

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

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. — Daniel Day-Lewis

I became conflicted in my late teens. — Daniel Day-Lewis

I suppose the place where I live is fairly remote, it would seem remote to some people. — Daniel Day-Lewis

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. — Daniel Day-Lewis

I hate wasting people's time. — Daniel Day-Lewis

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. — Daniel Day-Lewis

God knows, I haven't always been successful. — Daniel Day-Lewis

A lot of guys in jail tattoo their hands. — Daniel Day-Lewis

I'm a warrior when it comes to pursuing roles. — Daniel Day-Lewis

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. — Daniel Day-Lewis

Acting is about people. Other people. Otherwise, you're not acting, you're doing monologues. — Daniel Day-Lewis

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

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. — Daniel Day-Lewis

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