Best 89 quotes of Daniel Day-lewis on MyQuotes

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

A lot of guys in jail tattoo their hands.

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.'

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

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

Be grateful, be grateful, be grateful.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

God knows, I haven't always been successful.

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

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

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 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 became conflicted in my late teens.

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.

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

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 feel my son should pay the price for what I do.

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 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 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 hate the domestic life.

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

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!

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.

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

I hate wasting people's time.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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 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 suppose I have a highly developed capacity for self-delusion, so it's no problem for me to believe that I'm somebody else.