Best 83 quotes of Bill Nighy on MyQuotes

All actors who have been around for a long time, which I have, and have been skint for long periods, which I have, find it difficult to turn down jobs. If I turn anything down my stomach turns over. I feel sick. It feels like gambling.

Anti-Semitism and Fascism have a long, mysterious, bewildering, poisonous and vile history and it's not exclusive to the Germans.

Anyone who can do the splits and come back up on the backbeat, as James Brown and Prince can, has my eternal respect. Prince, who is a genius of the highest order, can come back up while singing and playing the guitar.

As you get older you feel you need to pay more attention to what is around you and relish it. I'm greedy for beauty.

A way of describing performances that I admire is that there is an absence of careerism. It's a clumsy way of describing it but it sort of does it for me.

Emma Watson is adorable in the extreme. She is such a lovely person.

From my point of view, it's very refreshing to play a regular human being and not someone from another dimension. When I say "not act," what I mean is just to be as natural and as normal as possible.

Hunger is almost like something the West does. It's almost like the direct result of the way the West performs.

I admire David Hare as much as I admire certainly any writer ever. What I like about his writing is it is very conscientiously, in one way, an attempt to reproduce the way people actually speak, but it's not just an attempt at naturalism. It's stylised and it's heightened, to great effect. It's elegant and it's funny and that's the way to my heart, frankly.

I am a fan of rehearsal. I like doing it [scene] over and over and over and over until it looks like you never did it before.

I did actually sit down with a blank sheet of paper once. I think the phone rang and that was the end of my literary career.

I did pick up a guitar once, but the strings hurt my fingers so I put it down again.

I don't dislike the process of animation... I find it daunting, but only as much as I find everything daunting.

I don't do plays without jokes anymore. I've retired from those plays. I think it's bad manners to invite people to sit in the dark for two and a half hours and not tell them the joke.

I don't normally watch films I'm in because I'm squeamish about that and it takes me quite a long time to recover and I have to go to work. I'm not being coy or cute, but it's just true.

I don't seem to be able to learn from experience or anything useful. History doesn't help me. Precedents don't inform my experience.

I don't think there's an improvised word in the movie. I hope not because I admire writing. Improvising is kind of gambling. It's just that you're standing up.

I don't want to associate myself with any specific group of politicians.

I do think 3D has seriously improved, since I was a boy. It's fabulous.

If I'm going to appear in front of people I like to look my best.

If I ruled the world, every woman would have a Chanel suit in her wardrobe.

If you are supposed to be villainous and have some sort of agenda, I like the idea of delivering that kind of character in a perfectly well-mannered way.

I got briefly mistaken for someone who might be good in bed, which was very, very good.

I guess part of the hit-man appeal is the solitude. Everybody is lured to the idea of the solitary life.

I have never owned a computer. I am one of those weirdos. I've never needed a computer. I'm lucky that I have a job where I'm not required to use one.

I have no memory, any at all, of actually performing the play, no recall in terms of the lines. I can't tell you any line from any play I've ever done.

I have nothing against romanticism. I'm all for it. I'm helpless in the face of romance.

I know really, really famous people who are terrified every time they walk on to a stage.

I like American black soul music, that was my first big enthusiasm.

I like being in kids' movies, and I like being in family movies.

I love imaginative representations of a possible near-future, where you look at the technology and you think, "Well, yeah, that could really nearly be true." I like those kinds of backgrounds.

I love playing half squid/half crab guy because you can get away with a level of acting that if you tried it anywhere else they'd arrest you for crimes against acting.

I'm a jacket man. And if I'm without one, I am kind of seriously disabled. I don't know how to operate in shirt sleeves.

I'm always happy when actors get rich, because the odds on it are so long!

I'm crazy about James Brown. I'm crazy about soul music. And then the blues. Rhythm and blues.

I'm just aware of what I'm thinking and feeling but I do obviously have to get that to the back of the auditorium. So there are things like projection and filling the room, and not dropping the ends of lines - technical things which are important, but I don't think they change the way I feel in a scene.

I'm lucky that I get to play a wide variety of parts.

I'm not a financial expert. The Robin Hood tax seems to me a very simple and beautiful idea. I don't see the problem.

I'm not an actor who consciously accesses bits of my life, in order to play parts. Obviously, you don't need to have been a father to play one, otherwise everyone who's been a father would be able to act.

I'm not a World War II buff. I know a little bit about it, I was taught the other side of the story in school, so it was unfamiliar to me, the idea of a German resistance, and yet it was considerable.

I'm not famous for my back story investigations; I'm lucky that I work with good writers and it's usually in the script.

I'm not good at watching myself which I think is perfectly natural. I don't give myself a hard time about it. I am the worst critic.

I'm one of those weird people who doesn't even own a computer.

I'm probably the only person who actually remembers pirate radio.

I never mind doing press; it's never bothered me.

In life, if you have an enthusiasm for what they call 'good manners,' sometimes people don't quite believe you. I've had that once or twice before, where they assume you can't be for real.

In the street, people talk to you about all kinds of things, but by far, the most number of people talk to me about Love, Actually.

I quoted David Hare one of his lines the other day to illuminate whatever point we were trying to make in the conversation, and I said 'What play was that?' and he said 'It was your line, you said it about a hundred and fifty times in The Vertical Hour.'

I really have no interest in delivering the iambic pentameter, I just want to kill myself. I don't mind other people doing it. I say that, but really I don't want to watch other people doing it. I get embarrassed.

It can't be overstated how wonderful it is not to have to audition any more. Any actor will tell you, it's like Christmas.