Quotes from Ralph Fiennes

Being an actor means asking people to look at you. I guess I accept that. But it's a profession in which the job is to show another world and other people. You may access it through bits of yourself, and your imagination and experience, but actually, in the end, you're not playing yourself.

You feel yourself working to show something. I've learned to distrust that feeling.

I got to read some writings by serial killers, and they got inside my head. They were quite disturbing. I read disturbing stuff about that very detached way of manipulating people to do things.

The tensions between authority and the people need to be heard, especially when they are suffering and they can't eat.

Success.. is all about being able to extend love to people... not in a big, capital letter sense but in the everyday. Little by little, task by task, gesture by gesture, word by word.

When she was younger, my mother was quite committed to Roman Catholicism. But she got disillusioned with it and moved closer to something like Buddhist beliefs near the end of her life.

I don't feel particularly comfortable about actors using whatever power they may have to push their beliefs, unless they're extremely well informed.

Little moments can have a feeling and a texture that is very real.

I never studied anything about film technique in school. Eventually, I realized that cinema and theater are not so different: from the gut to the heart to the head of a character is the same journey for both.

If I had a gun to my head and I had to choose between theater and film I'd choose theater.

When theater becomes a soothing middle-class thing, when it's packaged as the Night Out, then that's the death of it.

I certainly gained a lot by reading about Shanghai.

In the studio system, things are expected of a film. By the first, second, third act, there's a generic language that comes out of the more commercial system.

God is not anything human. God is a force, God is chaos, God is unknown. God is terror and enlightenment at the same time.

You have to just dive over the edge. You haven't got time to mess about.

I'm not very good at being domesticated. I've tried. The domestic life I find claustrophobic - the rituals and habits and patterns.

You dread that there will be real problems during filming.

I have grown up loving Shakespeare.

I was only interested in my scene, and I had to go through thousands and thousands of other scenes. I got my scene and I read it many, many, many, many, many times. That was my research.

I can't go and shoot people in the back of the head because It's a kids' movie, which is actually quite a good test because you haven't got the overt threat of a knife in the face.

In the best material, you always should be able to somehow make a case for a story to be transposed to any other time.

I loved doing Harry Potter. I had a great time on that. And I think it's good to have a mix. I think you're learning all the time.

I don't feel I'm playing villains all the time.

There are those moments when you shake someone's hand, have a conversation with someone, and suddenly your all bound together because you share your humanity in one simple moment.