Daniel Day-Lewis

“I feel less often compelled to do the work than I was in the past.”

“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.”

“Films exhaust me, they do, and I often want nothing more to do with them, but I'm continually surprised at the resurgence of the impulse to come back and do it all over again.”

“I'm not picky, quite honestly.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Ireland was a place for the renewal of hope and I still see it like that.”

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

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

“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.”

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

“I would wish for any one of my colleagues to have the experience of working with Martin Scorsese once in their lifetime.”

“At some point in your life, if you're lucky, you get to design the way in which things evolve.”

“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.'”

“I find it easier to work when it's quiet.”

“I love to sit and watch people. I love to sit and listen to people.”

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

“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.”