Daniel Day-Lewis Quotes

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!

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.

Everybody has to know for themselves what they're capable of.

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.

I live in a landscape, which every single day of my life is enriching.

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.

A voice is such a deep, personal reflection of character.

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.

Acting is about people. Other people. Otherwise, you're not acting, you're doing monologues.

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.

The more articulate somebody is, the more suspicious I am of them. I like to feel that the important things remain unsaid.

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.

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.

I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed. I hate most people.

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

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.

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.

I spend many months in apparently listless rumination out of which I hope something will emerge.

You can never fully put your finger on the reason why you're suddenly, inexplicably compelled to explore one life as opposed to another.

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.

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

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!

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.

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.'

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 toward it.

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.

I was a savage for so many years of my life. There was some seed of determination in me that I was not conscious of. I was mostly consciously getting into trouble and drunk.

Making a film, setting it up and getting it cast and getting it together, is not an easy thing

Actors should never give interviews.

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!

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.

I'm a little bit perverse, and I just hate doing the thing that's the most obvious.

How people are around a director, it really does affect everything, every detail of the life of the movie.

Be grateful, be grateful, be grateful.

There must've been some part of me that wanted to make my mark. But there was never a defining moment.

How can you be a recluse in a house full of children, even if you had the inclination to be, which I don't?

I have a strange relationship with time. I'm not aware of it passing.

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

I'm very often still very much alive for that other being and that other world long after the film is finished

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.

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

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.

Very often there's this misapprehension about actors being people that need to display themselves, to reveal themselves in public.

I'm woefully one-track-minded.

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

I avoid talking about the way I work. But in avoiding it I seem only to have encouraged people to focus their fantasies about me in an ever more fantastical way on the details that are not at all at the centre of the work.

Perhaps I'm particularly serious, because I'm not unaware of the potential absurdity of what I'm doing.

The whole thing of weight, I guess it's because there is a wider fascination we all have with weight.

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

I've been very lucky.