Top 80 Bill Nighy Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I never mind doing press; it’s never bothered me.”

— Bill Nighy

52. “I got briefly mistaken for someone who might be good in bed, which was very, very good.”

— Bill Nighy

53. “It’s probably healthier to find fame later in life.”

— Bill Nighy

54. “Hunger is almost like something the West does. It’s almost like the direct result of the way the West performs.”

— Bill Nighy

55. “I used to think that prizes were damaging and divisive, until I got one. And now they seem sort of meaningful and real.”

— Bill Nighy

56. “I think in the old days, everybody used to act really quickly because Hollywood was built by theatre people.”

— Bill Nighy

57. “I did actually sit down with a blank sheet of paper once. I think the phone rang and that was the end of my literary career.”

— Bill Nighy

58. “You get older and you see yourself and say, ‘God, he’s old, who’s that?’”

— Bill Nighy

59. “I really have no interest in delivering the iambic pentameter, I just want to kill myself. I don’t mind other people doing it. I say that, but really I don’t want to watch other people doing it. I get embarrassed.”

— Bill Nighy

60. “I guess part of the hit-man appeal is the solitude. Everybody is lured to the idea of the solitary life.”

— Bill Nighy

61. “Actors always talk about taking their work home and I always think: ‘What are you on? You just turn it off. You are at work and then you go home.’”

— Bill Nighy

62. “I generally do things I’m proud to be in and generally I’m in things people like.”

— Bill Nighy

63. “The degree of notoriety I have is fine and easy. There’s nothing hysterical about it.”

— Bill Nighy

64. “When you are in something that you’re proud of and it’s funny and it’s a good night out and all of those things, there’s nothing quite like it. The rewards are proportionate to the amount of alarm and distress it causes you.”

— Bill Nighy

65. “I have no memory, any at all, of actually performing the play, no recall in terms of the lines. I can’t tell you any line from any play I’ve ever done.”

— Bill Nighy

66. “I quoted David Hare one of his lines the other day to illuminate whatever point we were trying to make in the conversation, and I said ‘What play was that?’ and he said ‘It was your line, you said it about a hundred and fifty times in The Vertical Hour.’”

— Bill Nighy

67. “I’m not famous for my back story investigations; I’m lucky that I work with good writers and it’s usually in the script.”

— Bill Nighy

68. “There are only three men in the world who are licensed to wear shorts: Brad Pitt, Johnny Depp and Tom Cruise.”

— Bill Nighy

69. “One is that you legislate according to natural selection, the other is that you don’t. You have compassion, you try and help people. It’s a fundamental clash between two people who happen to love each other, which complicates everything.”

— Bill Nighy

70. “I know really, really famous people who are terrified every time they walk on to a stage.”

— Bill Nighy

71. “When you’ve been going on about something for a while, it is always satisfying to discover that other people agree with you.”

— Bill Nighy

72. “When people warned me there would be long periods out of work if I became an actor, I couldn’t keep a straight face because that was exactly what I had in mind.”

— Bill Nighy

73. “I do think 3D has seriously improved, since I was a boy. It’s fabulous.”

— Bill Nighy

74. “I never go on the net or the web, or whatever it’s called.”

— Bill Nighy

75. “One of the things that is assumed about actors is that they are extrovert, which is almost never the case, in my experience.”

— Bill Nighy

76. “If you ask any actor “What single thing would make you really, really happy?” Among the top five things they’d say is not having to audition anymore.”

— Bill Nighy

77. “My dad had a personal style which was very attractive. It was quite reserved and quite elegant, and it was infectious.”

— Bill Nighy

78. “You tell yourself that you’re not auditioning but of course you work like crazy, and you prepare like mad. And you think, “Well, I won’t get that job. But maybe they’ll have another job sometime, and they’ll remember that I was good.””

— Bill Nighy

79. “A way of describing performances that I admire is that there is an absence of careerism. It’s a clumsy way of describing it but it sort of does it for me.”

— Bill Nighy

80. “Jerry Bruckheimer says that he makes films that he would want to see, and it seems that that coincides with what a lot of people want to see.”

— Bill Nighy

81. “The job is the same – to attempt to make it sound like you’ve never said it before and as if it’s just occurred to you. And that’s the same whether you’re on camera or whether you’re on stage in a room full of people.”

— Bill Nighy

82. “When I do a play, it’s like agreeing to be ill for a couple of months.”

— Bill Nighy

83. “One of the reasons I like a suit is because I’ve never been that keen on my body. The shape a suit presents is always going to be better than anything I can do.”

— Bill Nighy

84. “I’m lucky that I get to play a wide variety of parts.”

— Bill Nighy

85. “If I’m going to appear in front of people I like to look my best.”

— Bill Nighy

86. “If you ever see me in a social setting wearing any sort of sportswear, then you know I’m in crisis.”

— Bill Nighy

87. “I’m always happy when actors get rich, because the odds on it are so long!”

— Bill Nighy

88. “I like American black soul music, that was my first big enthusiasm.”

— Bill Nighy

89. “There is something, yeah, I mean traditionally it’s more fun to play bad guys than it is good guys and when you’re playing a bad guy, yeah, the fun in it is to see how scary you can be, how horrible you can be. And it’s surprising what you come up with.”

— Bill Nighy