Stephen Rea Quotes

I think great art is always ambiguous and can't be pinned down.

People ask me to smile for the camera, but somehow it always comes out gloomy.

The End of the Affair is a good movie because it about things, things that really matter. Love, sex, death. Have you ever seen romance?

I have never been to a brothel. I don't think I could go into one.

I am afraid of death, scared by it. I already don't know whether I exist or not. So dying really terrifies me.

I don't feel ashamed of my wife's political background, and I don't think she should either. I feel that the people who administered the North of Ireland for the last 20 years should be ashamed. There you are.

I've been worked over by the English press because there's an assumption that my politics are identical with my wife's, and for that matter that my wife's politics are identical with her politics of 20 years ago.

People often refer to my career before The Crying Game as something which led up to that point. But I was very fulfilled in what I was doing.

That was the beginning of modern acting for me. You don't have to tell a camera everything. It gets bored if you do and wants to look elsewhere.

The worst thing for an actor is a director that gets on your nerves and says things that actually confuse you.

I didn't want to be seen as just a guy on a list. I'm interested in good scripts, scripts that are about something, scripts that move your acting along.

At this moment, when Ireland seems about to break into something new, we thought it was worth looking back at a time when people seemed to have found a way out of the sectarian division of the country.

At least when you're acting you can be someone. In front of the camera you have to be yourself. And who am I?

Angel was the first Irish feature film. Neil's first movie and my first movie.

I believe some people in this business suffer from fame because they behave in a famous fashion.

I don't know that I'm 'hangdog'. That suggests someone skulking around, unengaged. I'm not. I'm 'engaged', believe me. I have just got a slightly sad face.

I loved movies as a teenager and saw as much American cinema as I could, but I hated the English films of the early 60s and had absolutely no point of identification with them.

I've never been in a bad play. There might have been bad productions and I might have been bad in them, but I've never been in a play that wasn't interesting or worthwhile doing on some level.

My kids act all the time and its exactly what I used to do.

I'm enjoying it, but I still don't know why I'm hooked on acting.

Acting is way of making yourself exist.

You have to know who you are, if you don't you have nightmares.