Top 100 Daniel Day-Lewis Quotes
#4. One of the great privileges of having grown up in a middle-class literary English household, but having gone to school in the front lines in Southeast London, was that I became half-street-urchin and half-good-boy at home. I knew that dichotomy was possible.
Daniel Day-Lewis
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. I think some actors thrive on working at a much greater pace than I do.
Daniel Day-Lewis
#10. 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
#11. At a certain age it just became apparent to me that this was probably the work that I would have to do.
Daniel Day-Lewis
#15. 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
#16. How people are around a director, it really does affect everything, every detail of the life of the movie.
Daniel Day-Lewis
#17. Making a film, setting it up and getting it cast and getting it together, is not an easy thing.
Daniel Day-Lewis
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. The last time I was on a small set would've been probably My Left Foot.
Daniel Day-Lewis
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#28. 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
#29. I suppose the place where I live is fairly remote, it would seem remote to some people.
Daniel Day-Lewis
#30. 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
#31. Acting is about people. Other people. Otherwise, you're not acting, you're doing monologues.
Daniel Day-Lewis
#34. It didn't occur to me that it was possible to breathe life into Abraham Lincoln.
Daniel Day-Lewis
#35. 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
#36. I don't deal at all well with the relative amount of stuff I have to face already.
Daniel Day-Lewis
#37. 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
#38. 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.
Daniel Day-Lewis
#39. 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
#40. 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
#43. I'm a little bit perverse, and I just hate doing the thing that's the most obvious.
Daniel Day-Lewis
#44. I'm not keen on history being tampered with ... to any extent.
Daniel Day-Lewis
#45. 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
#46. Well, we all have murderous thoughts throughout the day, if not the week.
Daniel Day-Lewis
#47. 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
#50. At some point in your life, if you're lucky, you get to design the way in which things evolve.
Daniel Day-Lewis
#51. Everybody has to know for themselves what they're capable of.
Daniel Day-Lewis
#52. 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
#53. I feel less often compelled to do the work than I was in the past.
Daniel Day-Lewis
#54. It is awesome to feel you are carrying on the family name.
Daniel Day-Lewis
#56. If you have a certain wildness of spirit, a cabinet maker's workshop is not the place to express it.
Daniel Day-Lewis
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. 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.
Daniel Day-Lewis
#60. We all live under some repression; we have to, it's part of the deal.
Daniel Day-Lewis
#61. It's easy to love humanity when you're this far away from it.
Daniel Day-Lewis
#62. 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
#63. I'm not really a storyteller myself - I tend to get all tangled up when I try and tell stories.
Daniel Day-Lewis
#64. 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
#65. I made the film in spite of Harvey, not because of Harvey.
Daniel Day-Lewis
#66. Perhaps I'm particularly serious, because I'm not unaware of the potential absurdity of what I'm doing.
Daniel Day-Lewis
#67. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. Germans don't speak in a German accent, they just speak German.
Daniel Day-Lewis
#73. 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
#74. There are always practical decisions to be made about any character you're playing.
Daniel Day-Lewis
#76. 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.
Daniel Day-Lewis
#77. I have a strange relationship with time. I'm not aware of it passing.
Daniel Day-Lewis
#79. I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed. I hate most people.
Daniel Day-Lewis
#80. Ireland was a place for the renewal of hope and I still see it like that.
Daniel Day-Lewis
#81. Periodically over the years I've always taken periods of time away from acting.
Daniel Day-Lewis
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. I have always been intrigued by these lives I have never experienced.
Daniel Day-Lewis
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. I just knew at an early time in my life how important privacy was.
Daniel Day-Lewis
#90. 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
#91. I never retreat from films, as it were, I simply indulge in other interests, that's all.
Daniel Day-Lewis
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. 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
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. 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
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