Daniel Day-Lewis Quotes - Page 2

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

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.

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!

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!

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 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'm woefully one-track-minded.

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

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.

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 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.

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

Be grateful, be grateful, be grateful.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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