Daniel Day-Lewis

“Ireland was a place for the renewal of hope and I still see it like that.”

“We all live under some repression; we have to, it's part of the deal.”

“As a member of the audience I don't like it that I can't see what's going on in the eyes and in the face and in the most subtle responses of a performer when I'm more than a few rows back. I...”

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

“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.”

“I suppose I have a highly developed capacity for self-delusion, so it's no problem for me to believe that I'm somebody else!”

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

“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.”

“My curiosity sustains me for the period of the shoot.”

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

“A lot of guys in jail tattoo their hands.”

“Being at the centre of a film is a burden one takes on with innocence the first time. Thereafter, you take it on with trepidation.”

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

“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.”

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

“I'd always felt very strongly in the power of vocation.”

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

“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.”