Quotes from Mark Rylance

It's an intuitive exercise to do a Shakespeare play and to go through a Shakespeare play.

I did audition a lot. One's agent is keen to get you into film and TV because there's more money. I was always getting myself into commitments to theatre companies.

Some actors are frightened and concentrating so hard on their own performance, you don't feel that anything you do makes any difference. They're just kicking a ball against a wall, so to speak.

Nature is very cruel. It is much riskier to love any living being than not. I'm painfully aware that even my little dog is a walking bundle of mortality. I'm painfully aware he's going to pass.

We have people we admire, like Einstein, saying mystery is the most beautiful thing a human being can experience. Yet, everywhere in our culture, everything that is truly mysterious is immediately dismissed.

It's a very dangerous and lonely thing, I imagine, to be a spy: to have friendships that are deceptions, that are not honest.

I know that some people who move into film lose their nerve for the stage.

You're stealing people's secrets. You convince them to give up their life and imagine the life you've created is real or more interesting. If it's a good play, they'll cry or think private thoughts about their lives or laugh.

So often, in my life, when you play a joke on another actor, you say, 'Hello? Steven Spielberg? It's for you.' What's it feel like? It's bizarre. He feels like he's a friend. He feels like he's some kid in the neighborhood who has a camera and makes films, now and then, and says, 'Would you come 'round and play?' It doesn't feel grand at all.

Shakespeare was the main thing I did in my life from the age of 16 when I first played 'Hamlet' at school. I then did summer stock the next summer and then went to RADA and joined the RSC and ran my own company and then worked at the Globe. That was about 30 years of my life.

There are still people, obviously, who are stopping you and want a selfie because they need to justify their own lives by being in close proximity to a celebrity... but those are minor with me. I'm not a major celebrity.

If I were to do a sequel, it would be with Sophie as a very old woman and The BFG the same, a bit like that 'Let the Right One' in film.

Our job is to make manifest the story, to be it. In a sense, the theatre is such a big star itself, bigger than any Shakespearean actor I could hire, that we should take the opportunity to fill it with voice and verse and movement, not interpretation.

I'm still struggling with whether I might want to get off the Internet. More and more people I know have. Daniel Day Lewis doesn't do the Internet at all, and I noticed he had many more books open around his house.

You know, I don't think you need to be educated to be a great actor.

It's an important thing for children to be able to make up their own words.

And it is a very beautiful idea, and possibly true, that a common man from Stratford with a common education was able to write these plays.