Daniel Day-Lewis Quotes - Page 3

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

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

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

I'm a warrior when it comes to pursuing roles.

The theater is a need for me. It's a terrible attraction, something I'm compelled to do. And one derives a form of nourishment from the theater which you can never get from films. Making films weakens you in some way. With the theater, the work itself is a regenerative process.

I hate wasting people's time.

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

I've got a serious-looking head.

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'm not picky, quite honestly.

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

Actors should never give interviews.

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

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

I hate the domestic life.

My curiosity sustains me for the period of the shoot.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.