Top 80 Bill Nighy Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I wanted to be a journalist, I thought it was glamorous and that I’d meet beautiful women in the rain.”

— Bill Nighy

2. “I’m not a financial expert. The Robin Hood tax seems to me a very simple and beautiful idea. I don’t see the problem.”

— Bill Nighy

3. “As you get older you feel you need to pay more attention to what is around you and relish it. I’m greedy for beauty.”

— Bill Nighy

4. “I don’t normally watch films I’m in because I’m squeamish about that and it takes me quite a long time to recover and I have to go to work. I’m not being coy or cute, but it’s just true.”

— Bill Nighy

5. “The phenomenon of vampires has always appealed to me. Everyone kind of likes a vampire story because it almost could be true.”

— Bill Nighy

6. “Never go anywhere you have to wear brown shoes.”

— Bill Nighy

7. “I don’t want to associate myself with any specific group of politicians.”

— Bill Nighy

8. “I don’t even own a car.”

— Bill Nighy

9. “More people saw me in ‘Love Actually’ than had seen me in everything else I had ever done up to that point.”

— Bill Nighy

10. “I did pick up a guitar once, but the strings hurt my fingers so I put it down again.”

— Bill Nighy

11. “Anti-Semitism and Fascism have a long, mysterious, bewildering, poisonous and vile history and it’s not exclusive to the Germans.”

— Bill Nighy

12. “I don’t do plays without jokes anymore. I’ve retired from those plays. I think it’s bad manners to invite people to sit in the dark for two and a half hours and not tell them the joke.”

— Bill Nighy

13. “I’m not a royal family watcher.”

— Bill Nighy

14. “I speed up past mirrors.”

— Bill Nighy

15. “I find it hard to relax around any man who’s got the second button on his shirt undone.”

— Bill Nighy

16. “If I ruled the world, every woman would have a Chanel suit in her wardrobe.”

— Bill Nighy

17. “I have never owned a computer. I am one of those weirdos. I’ve never needed a computer. I’m lucky that I have a job where I’m not required to use one.”

— Bill Nighy

18. “Emma Watson is adorable in the extreme. She is such a lovely person.”

— Bill Nighy

19. “When it comes to casual clothing, my enthusiasm for clothes starts to waver.”

— Bill Nighy

20. “I’m probably the only person who actually remembers pirate radio.”

— Bill Nighy

21. “I’m a jacket man. And if I’m without one, I am kind of seriously disabled. I don’t know how to operate in shirt sleeves.”

— Bill Nighy

22. “You can ruin your life wanting to be an actor.”

— Bill Nighy

23. “I hardly even leave my own house.”

— Bill Nighy

24. “I don’t spend a lot of time with anybody.”

— Bill Nighy

25. “I’m not an actor who consciously accesses bits of my life, in order to play parts. Obviously, you don’t need to have been a father to play one, otherwise everyone who’s been a father would be able to act.”

— Bill Nighy

26. “In life, if you have an enthusiasm for what they call ‘good manners,’ sometimes people don’t quite believe you. I’ve had that once or twice before, where they assume you can’t be for real.”

— Bill Nighy

27. “Anyone who can do the splits and come back up on the backbeat, as James Brown and Prince can, has my eternal respect. Prince, who is a genius of the highest order, can come back up while singing and playing the guitar.”

— Bill Nighy

28. “I have a perfectly average skewed perception of myself. We often don’t know what we’re like.”

— Bill Nighy

29. “I’m crazy about James Brown. I’m crazy about soul music. And then the blues. Rhythm and blues.”

— Bill Nighy

30. “It’s more than usually possible that I won’t do a play again. But Skylight is one of the great plays in the English language. I was lucky enough to be a part of it at one point in its life, and it’s a timely thing to deliver it again in the modern world.”

— Bill Nighy

31. “I’m not a World War II buff. I know a little bit about it, I was taught the other side of the story in school, so it was unfamiliar to me, the idea of a German resistance, and yet it was considerable.”

— Bill Nighy

32. “I’m not good at watching myself which I think is perfectly natural. I don’t give myself a hard time about it. I am the worst critic.”

— Bill Nighy

33. “The way the elderly are treated, and in some cases warehoused and medicated, rather than nurtured and listened to, is distressing.”

— Bill Nighy

34. “When you have a family, or even when you’re just seeing a girl, it’s difficult to be skint.”

— Bill Nighy

35. “You have all these plans to act, and maybe do it rather elegantly, and then they turn the rain machine on.”

— Bill Nighy

36. “I don’t seem to be able to learn from experience or anything useful. History doesn’t help me. Precedents don’t inform my experience.”

— Bill Nighy

37. “All actors who have been around for a long time, which I have, and have been skint for long periods, which I have, find it difficult to turn down jobs. If I turn anything down my stomach turns over. I feel sick. It feels like gambling.”

— Bill Nighy

38. “I don’t think there’s an improvised word in the movie. I hope not because I admire writing. Improvising is kind of gambling. It’s just that you’re standing up.”

— Bill Nighy

39. “I love imaginative representations of a possible near-future, where you look at the technology and you think, “Well, yeah, that could really nearly be true.” I like those kinds of backgrounds.”

— Bill Nighy

40. “I’m one of those weird people who doesn’t even own a computer.”

— Bill Nighy

41. “With stage, you feel completely like you’re just in a bubble. I love not being able to see anything. I love coming out and I can’t see anything because the lights are so bright and it’s pitch black. That’s ideal for me, that’s when I have the best time.”

— Bill Nighy

42. “I’ve always slightly worried the kids who play football around my house. They know I’m an actor, but felt sorry for me because they’d never seen anything I’ve done.”

— Bill Nighy

43. “It can’t be overstated how wonderful it is not to have to audition any more. Any actor will tell you, it’s like Christmas.”

— Bill Nighy

44. “If you are supposed to be villainous and have some sort of agenda, I like the idea of delivering that kind of character in a perfectly well-mannered way.”

— Bill Nighy

45. “In the street, people talk to you about all kinds of things, but by far, the most number of people talk to me about Love, Actually.”

— Bill Nighy

46. “Somebody asked me recently, ‘Have you done a lot of plays?’ I thought hang on. I used to do nothing but plays. I’ve been very fortunate that on several occasions I’ve had jobs where I didn’t want to be anywhere else in the world whatever you had to offer – however much money you’ve got.”

— Bill Nighy

47. “From my point of view, it’s very refreshing to play a regular human being and not someone from another dimension. When I say “not act,” what I mean is just to be as natural and as normal as possible.”

— Bill Nighy

48. “Standing in front of a fake mountain with fake snow falling and seven girls dressed as Santarettes will stay in my memory.”

— Bill Nighy

49. “I have nothing against romanticism. I’m all for it. I’m helpless in the face of romance.”

— Bill Nighy

Featured in: Romance Quotes

50. “When a movie is called ‘searingly honest,’ it’s almost invariably grim and demonstrates how bad things can get.”

— Bill Nighy