Bill Nighy Quotes

As you get older you feel you need to pay more attention to what is around you and relish it. I'm greedy for beauty.

The way the elderly are treated, and in some cases warehoused and medicated, rather than nurtured and listened to, is distressing.

If you ever see me in a social setting wearing any sort of sportswear, then you know I'm in crisis.

One of my great regrets, and I don't have many, is that I spent too long putting people's status and reputation ahead of their more important qualities. I learned far too late in life that a long list of letters after someone's name is no guarantee of compassion, kindness, humour, all the far more relevant stuff.

I would like to change everything, but obviously not everything. I've been incredibly fortunate. I guess everybody would do this, but I'd go back to my younger self and say, "Lighten up. Take it easy. Relax. Don't be so anxious about everything. Try to be in the day. Try to not have today stolen from you by anxiety about yesterday or tomorrow."

I'm not a financial expert. The Robin Hood tax seems to me a very simple and beautiful idea. I don't see the problem.

I find it hard to relax around any man who's got the second button on his shirt undone.

With stage, you feel completely like you're just in a bubble. I love not being able to see anything. I love coming out and I can't see anything because the lights are so bright and it's pitch black. That's ideal for me, that's when I have the best time.

One of the great regrets of my life is that I smoked. If I could say anything to anybody starting out in life it would be, 'Whatever you do, don't smoke'. I have had to recover from that and been lucky that I have been able to stop.

When people warned me there would be long periods out of work if I became an actor, I couldn't keep a straight face because that was exactly what I had in mind.

I never go on the net or the web, or whatever it's called.

The phenomenon of vampires has always appealed to me. Everyone kind of likes a vampire story because it almost could be true.

I'm not a royal family watcher.

I used to joke that one of the reasons there was a lack of classical work on my CV was because I couldn't operate in those kinds of trousers. Which is a joke, but it's actually also true - if I want to appear in public I want to look my best. If I'm onstage I like to do contemporary work, largely because of the trousers, because of the clothes. I like a decent, what we used to call a lounge suit. Then I can start to motor.

I'm just aware of what I'm thinking and feeling but I do obviously have to get that to the back of the auditorium. So there are things like projection and filling the room, and not dropping the ends of lines - technical things which are important, but I don't think they change the way I feel in a scene.

Opening a play is just tough. The idea that actors are weirdly protected from it is a myth. If you imagine yourself having to spend two and a bit hours cooking bolognaise, remembering a whole major work by David Hare and speaking it at the correct moment between chopping carrots and stirring the onions in front of an audience - the normal human response is 'Please, can I go to the airport?'

I'm a jacket man. And if I'm without one, I am kind of seriously disabled. I don't know how to operate in shirt sleeves.

To be serious, the things you really want to relive are things like bedtime with your daughter when she becomes incredibly entertaining 'cause she doesn't want to go to sleep. They're at their most enchanting 'cause they just want to put it off, so they do a cabaret for you. You sit there thinking, "Please don't let this end."

I wanted to be a journalist, I thought it was glamorous and that I'd meet beautiful women in the rain.

I got briefly mistaken for someone who might be good in bed, which was very, very good.

It can't be overstated how wonderful it is not to have to audition any more. Any actor will tell you, it's like Christmas.

I love playing half squid/half crab guy because you can get away with a level of acting that if you tried it anywhere else they'd arrest you for crimes against acting.

I have a perfectly average skewed perception of myself. We often don't know what we're like.

If I ruled the world, every woman would have a Chanel suit in her wardrobe.

Anti-Semitism and Fascism have a long, mysterious, bewildering, poisonous and vile history and it's not exclusive to the Germans.

I'm not a World War II buff. I know a little bit about it, I was taught the other side of the story in school, so it was unfamiliar to me, the idea of a German resistance, and yet it was considerable.

I did pick up a guitar once, but the strings hurt my fingers so I put it down again.

Somebody asked me recently, 'Have you done a lot of plays?' I thought hang on. I used to do nothing but plays. I've been very fortunate that on several occasions I've had jobs where I didn't want to be anywhere else in the world whatever you had to offer - however much money you've got.

Jerry Bruckheimer says that he makes films that he would want to see, and it seems that that coincides with what a lot of people want to see.

You have all these plans to act, and maybe do it rather elegantly, and then they turn the rain machine on.

If you ask any actor "What single thing would make you really, really happy?" Among the top five things they'd say is not having to audition anymore.

In the street, people talk to you about all kinds of things, but by far, the most number of people talk to me about Love, Actually.

I have nothing against romanticism. I'm all for it. I'm helpless in the face of romance.

Standing in front of a fake mountain with fake snow falling and seven girls dressed as Santarettes will stay in my memory.

I'm not good at watching myself which I think is perfectly natural. I don't give myself a hard time about it. I am the worst critic.

A way of describing performances that I admire is that there is an absence of careerism. It's a clumsy way of describing it but it sort of does it for me.

I have no memory, any at all, of actually performing the play, no recall in terms of the lines. I can't tell you any line from any play I've ever done.

I love imaginative representations of a possible near-future, where you look at the technology and you think, "Well, yeah, that could really nearly be true." I like those kinds of backgrounds.

I admire David Hare as much as I admire certainly any writer ever. What I like about his writing is it is very conscientiously, in one way, an attempt to reproduce the way people actually speak, but it's not just an attempt at naturalism. It's stylised and it's heightened, to great effect. It's elegant and it's funny and that's the way to my heart, frankly.

It's more than usually possible that I won't do a play again. But Skylight is one of the great plays in the English language. I was lucky enough to be a part of it at one point in its life, and it's a timely thing to deliver it again in the modern world.

When you are in something that you're proud of and it's funny and it's a good night out and all of those things, there's nothing quite like it. The rewards are proportionate to the amount of alarm and distress it causes you.

The job is the same - to attempt to make it sound like you've never said it before and as if it's just occurred to you. And that's the same whether you're on camera or whether you're on stage in a room full of people.

One is that you legislate according to natural selection, the other is that you don't. You have compassion, you try and help people. It's a fundamental clash between two people who happen to love each other, which complicates everything.

I'm crazy about James Brown. I'm crazy about soul music. And then the blues. Rhythm and blues.

I really have no interest in delivering the iambic pentameter, I just want to kill myself. I don't mind other people doing it. I say that, but really I don't want to watch other people doing it. I get embarrassed.

I quoted David Hare one of his lines the other day to illuminate whatever point we were trying to make in the conversation, and I said 'What play was that?' and he said 'It was your line, you said it about a hundred and fifty times in The Vertical Hour.'

You tell yourself that you're not auditioning but of course you work like crazy, and you prepare like mad. And you think, "Well, I won't get that job. But maybe they'll have another job sometime, and they'll remember that I was good."

I like American black soul music, that was my first big enthusiasm.

I'm probably the only person who actually remembers pirate radio.

I'm not an actor who consciously accesses bits of my life, in order to play parts. Obviously, you don't need to have been a father to play one, otherwise everyone who's been a father would be able to act.