Damian Lewis

“Having been on a private jet only two or three times, it's one of life's great luxuries.”

“I'm very sad 'Life' wasn't a big hit, But it was undone by politics at NBC. It was intense. I moved my wife, and we had two children back to back. So working those hours and living abroad in L.A. was a handful. But it was a great experience.”

“No Western government has ever played the long-term in terms of foreign policy.”

“I love playing sport.”

“I think people like to be scared. I think people like tension and suspense in a movie.”

“I'm not very good at strategizing.”

“This high-end, novelistic form of TV, you know, is just peppered with despicable people who do marvelous things and marvelous people who do despicable things.”

“My wife has a horror the children will start talking American if we spend too much time out there.”

“There are lots of different reasons to choose roles.”

“I just don't consider myself to be, you know, an American actor. I don't want that life.”

“A lot of these American actors have this - in my view - misplaced view that they have to look like Action Man. The trouble is, they all run the risk of being interchangeable.”

“There's something important, as an actor, about allowing yourself to be approached by people to do roles. People see different things in you.”

“You just have to take control of your own performance.”

“There are ways of avoiding becoming tabloid fodder and therefore giving people license to pry into your private life. And there's a distinction between being an actor and being a celebrity. You may become a celebrity through acting, but you don't need to do so.”

“It's successful, middle-class Arab men and women, professionals with seemingly happy family lives, who are prepared to go to paradise for a greater cause. That's terrifying.”

“It's certainly true that I was brought up in that British amateur tradition, the one which always held that if you were reasonably good at cricket, knew one or two Latin texts and a few zingy Oscar Wilde quotes for dinner parties, you were pretty much ready to go and run some outpost in Hindustan.”

“You can't do something that is morally vacuous or dysfunctional and then write it off saying, 'It wasn't my film, I was just doing a job in it.'”

“There's this sort of cloud that hangs where people are like: 'How long can you keep the heat of 'Homeland' going?' People have short memories is the truth, and Hollywood loves the new and shiny.”

“My background was fairly conservative, and I think there's a strong notion of duty in a background like that, and I don't think that's always helpful.”

“I've always been a narcissist.”