Quotes from Daniel Day-Lewis

Quite honestly, if I were doing work related to a living being or historical being where there was visual or audio recordings available, I would find that extremely difficult because I don't know how you would avoid the process of mimicry. And mimicry, to me at any rate, is a very dull prospect.

I had a very vivid, almost hallucinatory moment in which I was engaged in a dialogue with my father.

I'm not sure you learn anything on film sets.

Shoes are strange things. If you take your shoes off in a situation in which you're vulnerable, you'll feel 10 times more vulnerable.

I broke things to get attention.

I'm a little bit perverse, and I just hate doing the thing that's the most obvious.

I'm not picky, quite honestly.

There must've been some part of me that wanted to make my mark. But there was never a defining moment.

I'm a warrior when it comes to pursuing roles.

It is awesome to feel you are carrying on the family name.

I suppose it's a very highly developed form of denial, but some part of me completely denies that I'm a performer.

I suppose the place where I live is fairly remote, it would seem remote to some people.

Films exhaust me, they do, and I often want nothing more to do with them, but I'm continually surprised at the resurgence of the impulse to come back and do it all over again.

When I did make the decision to focus on acting, I think my mother was just relieved for me that I had finally started to focus.

God knows, I haven't always been successful.

I don't do all of this as an indulgence. I do it because I'm not a good enough actor to not do it.

It's a source of great sadness to me that my father died without having seen me do anything worthwhile. He was constantly having to make excuses for me.

I'm not keen on history being tampered with... to any extent.

I spend many months in apparently listless rumination out of which I hope something will emerge.

I think I have a strange relationship with time. I'm not really aware of that time passing. I don't feel that I'm wasteful with time. But I'm not aware of it passing.

As actors, we're all encouraged to feel that each job is the last job. They plant some little electrode in your head at an early stage and you think, 'Be grateful, be grateful, be grateful.'

I would wish for any one of my colleagues to have the experience of working with Martin Scorsese once in their lifetime.

My curiosity sustains me for the period of the shoot.

I come from not just a household but a country where the finesse of language, well-balanced sentence, structure, syntax, these things are driven into us, and my parents, bless them, are great custodians of the English language.