Top 80 Colin Firth Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I love you even when you’re sick and look disgusting.”

— Colin Firth

2. “I like playing strange characters. Some people might say it has something to do with a hidden part of myself, but I think it’s a lot simpler than that: normal people are just not very interesting.”

— Colin Firth

3. “When I visited coffee farms in Ethiopia, the farmers could not believe we spend a week’s wages in their country on a cup of coffee in ours, because they see so little of the profits. Oxfam’s fair trade campaign helps right this wrong.”

— Colin Firth

4. “When I’m really into a novel, I’m seeing the world differently during that time – not just for the hour or so in the day when I get to read. I’m actually walking around in a haze, spellbound by the book and looking at everything through a different prism.”

— Colin Firth

Featured in: Reading Quotes

5. “My singing voice is somewhere between a drunken apology and a plumbing problem.”

— Colin Firth

6. “I’ll be your friend so long as you’re not crap.”

— Colin Firth

7. “It’s a very dangerous state. You are inclined to recklessness and kind of tune out the rest of your life and everything that’s been important to you. It’s actually not all that pleasurable. I don’t know who the hell wants to get in a situation where you can’t bear an hour without somebody’s company.”

— Colin Firth

8. “Looking in the mirror, staring back at me isn’t so much a face as the expression of a predicament.”

— Colin Firth

9. “I never saw myself as Mr. Ugly, but I’m not that handsome. I can sort of be made to look quite a lot better or quite a lot worse.”

— Colin Firth

10. “I think it’s quite extraordinary that people cast me as if I’m Warren Beatty: until I met my present wife, at the age of 35, you could name two girlfriends.”

— Colin Firth

11. “Nothing brings you closer together than blind terror.”

— Colin Firth

12. “Because I am an Englishman I spent most of my life in a state of embarrassment.”

— Colin Firth

13. “Just driving I just was in a car on flat ground and I couldn’t make it go. Having ticked driving and taken three driving lessons, I just was unable to produce any motion whatsoever under perfectly normal circumstances. I think we’ve all been busted on driving, and riding.”

— Colin Firth

14. “It’s a funny thing – the reality is I have no feelings about school. It’s long gone. Funnily enough, the bad memories – of which I don’t have any left to be honest, I can just remember a sense of tedium – have faded. And teachers that I liked have remained quite vivid. There are three or four left.”

— Colin Firth

15. “I think England has served me very well. I like living in London for the reasons I gave. I have absolutely no intentions of cutting those ties. There is absolutely no reason to do so. Certainly not, so that I can have a swimming pool and a palm tree.”

— Colin Firth

16. “Firth – all dodgy ‘tache and frantic eyebrows – has got the sexual allure of a man who runs a swingers’ club in Surbiton.”

— Colin Firth

17. “If you’re playing someone who’s impeded by fear, or shyness, or has whatever dysfunction your character might have, you have to achieve the dysfunction first, imaginatively, in order to play someone who is trying to negotiate their way out of it.”

— Colin Firth

18. “The last thing I would attempt to do is to buy clothes for a child I didn’t know well.”

— Colin Firth

19. “To be bothered wherever you go – it’s not a rational thing to want at all.”

— Colin Firth

20. “It’s entirely to do with personality, I think. There are good directors who talk a lot, bad directors who talk a lot, and good directors who don’t say much and vice-versa. It just depends on whether people respond to that personality and whether people have a willingness to do something for them.”

— Colin Firth

21. “Sometimes to think about why some institutions are stable, it’s interesting to go one generation back and look at the author of that stability.”

— Colin Firth

22. “It’s whether they have a vision and whether they’re able to communicate it. The best director is just someone who gets over-excited about doing it – they don’t even have to know much about camera or acting.”

— Colin Firth

23. “Comedy – particularly the frothy and frivolous – is notoriously neglected by festivals and awards. But it’s bloody hard to get right.”

— Colin Firth

24. “If you’re playing someone who’s got marital problems, you have to play someone who’s trying not to have marital problems. So, you’ve got to get into the problem first.”

— Colin Firth

25. “I absolutely don’t care about my looks and I’m so used to them that I wouldn’t change a thing. I would end up missing my defects.”

— Colin Firth

26. “My parents and grandparents have always been engaged in teaching or the medical profession or the priesthood, so I’ve sort of grown up with a sense of complicity in the lives of other people, so there’s no virtue in that; it’s the way one is raised.”

— Colin Firth

27. “I think everyone is throwing happy stuff at you, and that’s when you come over all humbug. It’s happy stuff in your face, happy stuff is being sold to you...”

— Colin Firth

28. “Maybe it’s shallow of me to have a wife that’s so beautiful, but it makes things easier. To me she’s the most beautiful woman in the world.”

— Colin Firth

29. “I have a very long relationship with America. My mother grew up there and I felt to some extent that I partly belong there. I was schooled there briefly for about a year.”

— Colin Firth

30. “Forget trying to be sexy. That’s just gruesome.”

— Colin Firth

31. “Doing a job, or even watching a film, can make a difference to your life, but I don’t think it ever has an explosive impact where your life will never be the same again. It kind of seeps into your life, and perhaps realise you’re a little more vigilant about certain things than you might have been.”

— Colin Firth

32. “You have to be ill if you want to get better.”

— Colin Firth

33. “Bridget Jones is part of literary lore now and actually to be a part of it is enormously flattering.”

— Colin Firth

34. “Less racist now but it has been. I don’t think it’s been completely stamped out. There’s a class element to it. And who’s supposed to do what. You’re very unlikely to get a gay grip.”

— Colin Firth

35. “No matter how much technique you draw on or how much training you have, acting is a mystery.”

— Colin Firth

36. “Actors are basically drag queens. People will tell you they act because they want to heal mankind or, you know, explore the nature of the human psyche. Yes, maybe. But basically we just want to put on a frock and dance.”

— Colin Firth

37. “So, if you haven’t picked up some tips during an apprenticeship like that, you shouldn’t be directing. It doesn’t mean you can do it, but it loads you up with information.”

— Colin Firth

38. “The great thing about dealing with people about whom we have historical resources, is that if the writing needs work, there’s everywhere to go to enrich it.”

— Colin Firth

39. “Most actors will tell you they have some sort of dream of doing something other than what they’re doing.”

— Colin Firth

40. “I do notice that when I’ve been away and I come back to London. People look at you. People are ready to pick arguments.”

— Colin Firth

41. “Whenever you take on playing a villain, he has to cease to be a villain to you. If you judge this man by his time, he’s doing very little wrong.”

— Colin Firth

42. “I do think I’m a character actor.”

— Colin Firth

43. “However good a communicator a director is, unless they’ve been actors, it’s just not the same as the shorthand you get with someone who’s been an actor.”

— Colin Firth

44. “When I look in the mirror, I don’t see my Dad, I see my grandmother. For a while it was my mother looking back at me. If only it was my Dad.”

— Colin Firth

45. “But this is where you get all the market research and things get in danger of becoming formulaic, and where you depend on brands and getting recognised actors. It’s the thing that precludes risk very often, otherwise everyone would be avant-garde all over the place.”

— Colin Firth

46. “I haven’t had to struggle very much. I haven’t paid my dues. I think I have been lucky.”

— Colin Firth

47. “I don’t know if this qualifies as gentle reassurance, but right now this is all that stands between me and a Harley-Davidson.”

— Colin Firth

48. “As much as the next person, I want to be approved of, but I’m not greedy for that stuff.”

— Colin Firth

49. “It does help to actually realize that however stunning the person who is, you know, fluttering eyelashes at you, she doesn’t do anything to match up to your wife.”

— Colin Firth

50. “My grandmother was a minister as well, which was not that common in the 1930s.”

— Colin Firth