Quotes from Mark Rylance

I have a lot of ideas come to me when I'm working that are different from the plan, and sometimes that can be a little overwhelming and difficult for directors.

It's difficult for me to say, but I don't think the sex scenes are particularly erotic.

You try, as an actor, to wear a mask; you're serving a story.

As a leader, you get a pat on the back when you make a hard choice.

I think, early on, I was very distrustful of authority yet needed a lot of approval from it. I was in that kind of bind. Which is a kind of abuse bind.

I had to turn down a part in 'Empire of the Sun.' It would have paid £15,000, which was a year's earnings for me then, but I was offered a season at the 'National Theatre.'

When I was a child, Sunday afternoons felt like they could last a week or a month. Increasingly, as I get older, time is going so, so fast.

I didn't particularly aim to be a Shakespeare actor, but I suppose I had a certain gift or it; I certainly got offered lots of it. I liked Complicite and Shared Experience and Kick Theatre, and all the small theatre companies that were getting going. I wanted to be like that, making original theatre.

Great actors try to dismiss all ideas from their conscious mind in order to provide an experience that is real.

And people do enjoy the plays at completely different levels. And, likewise, they enjoy the authorship question... at completely different levels.

I like to connect with the other actors in a fantasy situation.

I just absolutely needed the theatre so desperately - it was my fate; it was where I was running towards. It was the place where I found peace and survival and all kinds of things.

My understanding is that we are generally a very philanthropic and compassionate people - that when there are disasters in the world, individual citizens send loads of money into appeals for different things. We're a bloody violent people, football fans, and we've been successful at wars, and we sell far too many weapons.

It's an awful thing to be aware of your own corruption. I think a lot of people are bound by the particular economic system we work in to serve companies and masters who aren't really telling people what they're doing.

But I don't sit down at dinner and have clever ideas.

I can't believe, even in 'The Guardian,' people ask the questions, 'Where did ISIS come from?' 'How did this happen?' 'Why do young Muslim women go off to join them?' Maybe because we've been degrading their people since 1917. Maybe their teenage years are a little bit more stressed than that of Christianity.

If there was no fame involved and very minimal money - which is the case for most actors - I'd still be doing it. If I wasn't good enough to be a professional, I'd be an amateur actor.

I certainly never pictured myself even attending the Academy Awards, much less winning at 56. I very, very happily settled into a theater career. I did more than that, but I let all of my agents and people go. I said, 'I don't want to be promoted in film anymore. I have enough to do in the theater, so I'm just going to carry on.'

I think that was very important to Bacon... personally. I think he went to great efforts to get a house for the Stratford man, to make it so difficult for us to prove that it was Francis Bacon, because it is very difficult to prove.

Every great filmmaker at some moment makes a war film.

I have great mood swings, maybe because of playing lots of different characters as I do. I'm like a gymnast whose muscles get too stretched. I've got better at it, but I have a lot of emotional energy.

You need to gain the confidence that you're doing enough on film. You must resist the temptation to do too much.

The publicity machine for films and television is so much bigger than for theatre.

I think the idea that life ends when we physically die is as painful as the idea in Cromwell's time that there's some awful purgatory, and you have to give money to the Catholic church to get your loved ones out. I certainly have experienced a lot of evidence that there's a consciousness that isn't physical.