At some point in your life, if you're lucky, you get to design the way in which things evolve.
Daniel Day-Lewis
I live in a landscape, which every single day of my life is enriching.
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.
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.
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 love to sit and watch people. I love to sit and listen to people.
I hate the domestic life.
There's nothing worse than finding yourself in a situation, a very demanding piece of work, and knowing that you're not a true ally to the person who's in charge of all that.
I became conflicted in my late teens.
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.
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.
How can you be a recluse in a house full of children, even if you had the inclination to be, which I don't?
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.
Perhaps I'm particularly serious, because I'm not unaware of the potential absurdity of what I'm doing.
I broke things to get attention.
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.
I'm a little bit perverse, and I just hate doing the thing that's the most obvious.
I love what I do.
Actors should never give interviews.
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.
I suppose the place where I live is fairly remote, it would seem remote to some people.
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 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 depleted myself to the point where I had nothing left.
It didn't occur to me that it was possible to breathe life into Abraham Lincoln.
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!
If people take an interest in you and they think there's half a chance, they might hang on. It's dreadful.
I just knew at an early time in my life how important privacy was.
I'm very often still very much alive for that other being and that other world long after the film is finished.
I have a strange relationship with time. I'm not aware of it passing.
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 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.
A voice is such a deep, personal reflection of character.
I've been very lucky.
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.
It is awesome to feel you are carrying on the family name.
I'm not picky, quite honestly.
God knows, I haven't always been successful.
I suppose it's a very highly developed form of denial, but some part of me completely denies that I'm a performer.
Where I come from, it was a heresy to say you wanted to be in movies, leave alone American movies.
I'm not sure you learn anything on film sets.
I'm a warrior when it comes to pursuing roles.
I'm not keen on history being tampered with... to any extent.
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.
The whole thing of weight, I guess it's because there is a wider fascination we all have with weight.
Germans don't speak in a German accent, they just speak German.
To people who don't know me I'm defined by a number of things that people know about me that are entirely untrue.
Making a film, setting it up and getting it cast and getting it together, is not an easy thing.
I don't feel my son should pay the price for what I do.
