Jeremy Irons Quotes

We all have our time machines, don't we. Those that take us back are memories...And those that carry us forward, are dreams.

At age 10 or 12 he's going to boarding school in the Isle of Wight. The Isle of Wight is, of course, down at the bottom of England just off South Hampton.

We all have our time machines. Some take us back, they're called memories. Some take us forward, they're called dreams.

I was the youngest. The yule lamb. The one who always got away without doing the washing up. My sister was four years older, and my brother six years.

What takes us back to the past are the memories. What brings us forward is our dreams.

It's just money; it's made up. Pieces of paper with pictures on it so we don't have to kill each other just to get something to eat.

When it seems that someone has shattered your dreams....pick up even the smallest of pieces and use them to build bigger and better dreams.

An acting assistant stage manager in a theater in Canterbury, a rep theater. A small wage but just enough to get by on, and I made props, and I walked on, and I changed scenery, and I realized that I just loved it.

So the better my partner or my opposition, however you like to think about it, the better my game.

I think I would not be described as a character actor in that I don't take on characteristics which are very alien to me.

I get bored very easily, so I love doing different things, changing, doing a job for a month and then doing another one for six months and then moving into a different group of people. I love being able to stop. That's one of the greatest benefits we have in our profession.

Most people are robust. If a man puts his hand on a woman’s bottom, any woman worth her salt can deal with it. It is communication. Can’t we be friendly?

I love being part of a group who tells stories, whether it be in the theater or in cinema, and I love creating imaginary worlds rather as children do, but I never had a burning desire to act, but it just sort of suited me.

The great thing about acting is, because you're constantly playing other characters and exploring yourself because you have to find those other characters in yourself, you sort of broaden as a person over your life because you've been other people. So you can empathize with many different sorts of people. It's great in that way and I hope, therefore, as you get older as an actor, you not only get more interesting because you lived more, but you get a bit wiser as a person.

You think, you don't just speak. The lines come off the thoughts.

And whenever I'm in a situation where I'm wearing the same as 600 other people and doing the same thing as 600 other people, looking back, I always found ways to make myself different, whether it be having a red lining inside of my jacket, having red shoes, it hasn't changed.

A trip to the mainland was a big event and happened maybe once a year, although now you can get across in a speed boat in seven minutes but then it was a long way away.

I succeeded on sort of chutzpah and charm. No technique at all, didn't know what I was doing, but it worked and the character suited me.

Now in my theater training I showed no aptitude at all.

One always returns to the fact that there are just too many of us, the population continues to rise and it's unsustainable.

Actors often behave like children, and so we're taken for children. I want to be grown up.

Making movies can actually be quite boring, there's a lot of sitting around and waiting. Unless you really believe in the story and love the character, and unless you really need the money, I don't see the point in doing it.

I had done a fair bit of traveling during the holidays in my school days with my guitar and discovered that I could live on it. Admittedly, I traveled with a sleeping bag but I could always find somewhere to lay my head.

Never played a video game. Actually, I try to keep them out of my house.

Mine is an actor's voice, not a singer's voice, but the part was written for an actor (Richard Burton), not a singer.

I was educated in a private school in England amongst people who had been trained for sort of banking or the Army or business. As I came towards the end of my education, I thought I must find something or I'll never meet any of these people again.

Americans enjoy uniformity in a way that the British don't; they wanted everybody of a sort of nice chorus line height and here I was, this person who was a good three inches taller than anyone else on the end of the line.

I've never been passionate about acting, and I find more and more that I work to live the life I want to live. [...] There's something about the detachment I have, the feeling of the lack of importance about what I do, that is healthy.

Sadly, one's parameters are constantly narrowed by one's success.

Because I'm now successful, what I'm being offered as an actor is more and more of the same.

Anywhere I can ski in the morning and sell a movie in the afternoon is good.

I'm very glad I'm not a politician. I think it's one step away from the gates of hell, being a politician. I really do. It`s a nightmare.

The fact is that in England so many of our politicians are career politicians - they've always been politicians since they left their education. And in the old days of course politicians used to be fish mongers or doctors or whatever. They'd lived life. These days, power seems to go to the hands of people that that's all they've done. And I'm not sure that's a good thing, because it does remove them from the realities of life.

There are a group of people who are managing the world to their advantage and who just look to the rest of us as people who will buy their products and fund their salaries.

I was not naturally intellectual, but somebody whose interest had to be whetted, still the case sadly.

I certainly play people on the edge quite a lot. I am interested in what makes people odd and what makes them different. In life I try to play the edges. I have a horror of the herd. There are many, many different sorts of people. A lot of people are fairly uninteresting. I want to play the interesting ones. The villains are always more interesting to portray. Shakespeare knew that.

I think nobody since has written such extraordinary work as Shakespeare writes. The characters he writes are full of inconsistencies, which is a great human quality - I mean we're all very inconsistent in the way we behave.

To be an actor you need various things. You need to have a head for choosing the roles. You have to be, hopefully, easy to work with so people enjoy working with you. You have to deal with missing roles, with not being asked to work, with doing good work and then being castigated by the critics for it. You have to have a skin that can deal with all of that. I, fortunately, seem to have the makeup which allows me to deal with the business. I mean, not as everybody.

I have to say that I've reached the state of my career where I quite like not to work. Strange enough, I'm busier than ever. I'm not spending every waking hour beside a telephone waiting for it to ring.

It's always great to play a man who sets himself up to be punctured.

The sad thing about any business I suppose, but in mine you see it particularly, is that you’re always asked to do what you’ve already done.

You have to communicate on a much greater scale. With a camera, you can use the flick of an eye. On stage, a lot of other things are happening that can pull focus or energy. You're always thinking the same way, but you have to amplify your thoughts with the volume of your speech and the ways you use your whole body to communicate what you're feeling. It's a little bit different from film.

You look worldwide for the great leaders, and they're pretty thin on the ground, and of course the problem is unless you're squeaky, squeaky clean, something is going to come out of the cupboard. Most people aren't squeaky clean. Most people have fallen by the wayside once or twice in their lives, and because the world is so transparent now, I think they're very fearful of running for office. It's a huge shame, because often people who have really lived and are amazing people can be brought down by a past indiscretion.

The work I prefer to do are the smaller budget pictures, television can be great but it ties you up for quite a long time.

I try to avoid doing movies where I act with tennis balls. It's ultimately incredibly tedious.

I've always thought of characters like advent calendars. You have Christmas and you have all the little doors over the windows and every day you're allowed to open one more as it gets towards Christmas and you see more and more about what's inside that house.I remember as a kid being fascinated by that and I've always thought of my character as a little bit like that. I like to have secrets and slowly let those secrets out to the audience, sometimes never let them out, but let them see as you open the shutters, open and see a little bit more of a character.

It's always useful to be in big movies for one's career.

I'm a complete libertarian. I think it's very, very dangerous. I really mean that. I think the smoking ban is a tip of an iceberg of society - the leaders of society telling us how to be. I think it's not their business. It's an attitude where the governors think, 'We know what's best for people, and they're so stupid that they would only not do it if we ban it.'

I constantly experience failure in that my work is never as good as I want it to be. So I live with failure.

So nevertheless, what I'm saying is that what one is - one's parameters are constantly narrowed by one's success, and my desire is to widen my field even if I risk failure.