Very often there’s this misapprehension about actors being people that need to display themselves, to reveal themselves in public. – Daniel Day-Lewis
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. – Daniel Day-Lewis
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. – Daniel Day-Lewis
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. – Daniel Day-Lewis
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 find it very frustrating. – Daniel Day-Lewis
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. – Daniel Day-Lewis
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. – Daniel Day-Lewis
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. – Daniel Day-Lewis
Perhaps I’m particularly serious, because I’m not unaware of the potential absurdity of what I’m doing. – Daniel Day-Lewis
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.’ – Daniel Day-Lewis
The whole thing of weight, I guess it’s because there is a wider fascination we all have with weight. – Daniel Day-Lewis
You can never fully put your finger on the reason why you’re suddenly, inexplicably compelled to explore one life as opposed to another. – Daniel Day-Lewis
For about a year, I just didn’t know what to do. I did laboring jobs, working in the docks, construction sites. – Daniel Day-Lewis
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. – Daniel Day-Lewis
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. – 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. – Daniel Day-Lewis
I’m not really a storyteller myself – I tend to get all tangled up when I try and tell stories. – Daniel Day-Lewis
Where I come from, it was a heresy to say you wanted to be in movies, leave alone American movies. – Daniel Day-Lewis
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. – Daniel Day-Lewis