Quotes from Daniel Day-Lewis

Well, we all have murderous thoughts throughout the day, if not the week.

I avoid talking about the way I work. But in avoiding it I seem only to have encouraged people to focus their fantasies about me in an ever more fantastical way.

I'm not really a storyteller myself - I tend to get all tangled up when I try and tell stories.

Just stay alive, no matter what occurs! I will find you. No matter how long it takes, no matter how far. I will find you!

The West has always been the epicentre of possibility. One of the ways we forge against mortality is to head west. It's to do with catching the sun before it slips behind the horizon.

There are always practical decisions to be made about any character you're playing.

I depleted myself to the point where I had nothing left.

A lot of guys in jail tattoo their hands.

I live in a landscape, which every single day of my life is enriching.

You can never fully put your finger on the reason why you're suddenly, inexplicably compelled to explore one life as opposed to another.

At some point in your life, if you're lucky, you get to design the way in which things evolve.

Very often there's this misapprehension about actors being people that need to display themselves, to reveal themselves in public.

I became conflicted in my late teens.

I like things that make you grit your teeth. I like tucking my chin in and sort of leading into the storm. I like that feeling. I like it a lot.

I was a savage for so many years of my life. There was some seed of determination in me that I was not conscious of. I was mostly consciously getting into trouble and drunk.

How people are around a director, it really does affect everything, every detail of the life of the movie.

I'm very often still very much alive for that other being and that other world long after the film is finished.

The whole thing of weight, I guess it's because there is a wider fascination we all have with weight.

I can't honestly account for the very personal response that I have to one story and not another, a sense of an orbit, the orbit of a world that draws me as my own life recedes.

I didn't like the idea of being foolish, but I learned pretty soon that it was essential to fail and be foolish.

The one thing that I appear to have been given, bearing in mind that I am capable of being very, very scatty and extremely lazy, is the ability to concentrate on something I choose to give my time to.

When it comes to parenthood everyone thinks they will be terrible at it. We don't think we have it in us. Then you find out that you do, which truly is a miracle in life.

I don't know what impression you might have of the way I live. I live in a quiet place. I do not live as a hermit, though other people would prefer it if I did.

Germans don't speak in a German accent, they just speak German.