Quotes from Daniel Day-Lewis

When I've gone back to work, it's always with that sense of inevitability. That may be a complete delusion, but it's the one that I need to get out of bed and go about my business. That sense that I can't avoid this thing. I better just get on with it.

I never retreat from films, as it were, I simply indulge in other interests, that's all.

For about a year, I just didn't know what to do. I did laboring jobs, working in the docks, construction sites.

It must be hard interviewing actors.

Actors should never give interviews.

I have always been intrigued by these lives I have never experienced.

I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed. I hate most people.

I like to cook things very slowly.

When I was younger, I made some decisions that I shouldn't have. And, in hindsight, I've almost always been wrong when I haven't listened to myself.

My main memories of my father are of his illness.

I don't feel my son should pay the price for what I do.

One of the great privileges of having grown up in a middle-class literary English household, but having gone to school in the front lines in Southeast London, was that I became half-street-urchin and half-good-boy at home. I knew that dichotomy was possible.

Perhaps I'm particularly serious, because I'm not unaware of the potential absurdity of what I'm doing.

I made the film in spite of Harvey, not because of Harvey.

England is obsessed with where you came from, and they are determined to keep you in that place, be it in a drawing room or in the gutter.

If you remain unsettled by a piece of writing, it means you are not watching the story from the outside; you've already taken a step towards it.

To people who don't know me I'm defined by a number of things that people know about me that are entirely untrue.

For as long as I can remember, the thing that gave me a sense of wonderment and renewal... has always been the work of other actors.

I see a lot of movies. I love films as a spectator, and that's never obscured by the part of me that does the work myself. I just love going to the movies.

I find it easier to work when it's quiet.

At a certain age it just became apparent to me that this was probably the work that I would have to do.

When I do work, I feel the same sort of urgency as I ever did. If I didn't feel that, I don't think I would wish to be doing it. I wouldn't really see the point.

I feel less often compelled to do the work than I was in the past.

My preference is that, that day when someone sticks a tripod in front of you with a camera on the top, it is not day one.