Top 80 Colin Firth Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “The English people, a lot of them, would not be able to understand a word of spoken Shakespeare. There are people who do and I’m not denying they exist. But it’s a far more philistine country than people think.”

— Colin Firth

52. “I was delighted to become a popular-culture reference point. I’m still delighted about it actually, and I still find it to be weird.”

— Colin Firth

53. “We’ve always been involved with America – I have a son who lives there and it’s a big part of my life.”

— Colin Firth

54. “I would rather five people knew my work and thought it was good work than five million knew me and were indifferent.”

— Colin Firth

55. “I’ve actually heard people protesting furiously about straight male costume people as well. It’s not universal and there are examples that break the mould all over the place. In my experience, it’s more prevalent in the UK than in America.”

— Colin Firth

56. “Almost every comedy you see is about people making all wrong choices and making all the errors of judgement possible. Good comedy is when it works on this scale. Because it is psychologically very real.”

— Colin Firth

57. “It used to be that I was always paranoid or a loser or something so there’s usually something that you seem to associate yourself with at one time or another.”

— Colin Firth

58. “One of my grandfathers, actually, having gone out there as a minister, decided he would better serve the people as a doctor. So at a very late age – at the age of 38 in fact – he changed course and decided to become a doctor.”

— Colin Firth

59. “I can’t bring you absolute truth in the detailed factual sense. All I can do is bring you an interpretation as I understand it. That’s all you can ever get from an actor.”

— Colin Firth

60. “I often think it can often be very difficult for comedians to revisit the same gag. I think Russell’s a bit more than a comedian.”

— Colin Firth

61. “I do think a good story in a novel is fair game and there’s nothing wrong with adapting that. It sometimes gets a bit facile where they think: “Let’s get the next best-seller and see if we can turn it into a film.””

— Colin Firth

62. “And that is a hard route for a woman to come through. There’s still a lot of roles that have to be conformed to. It’s quite an old fashioned environment in a lot of ways.”

— Colin Firth

63. “I have a kind of neutrality, physically, which has helped me. I have a face that can be made to look a lot better – or a lot worse.”

— Colin Firth

64. “Directors don’t get to see other directors at work – they’re the only one on the set. I’ve met directors who’ve asked me what another filmmaker is like. So, there’s probably nobody better placed to make all the comparisons and to pick up stuff than an actor.”

— Colin Firth

65. “On his fight scene with Hugh Grant in Bridget Jones: It was a delicious experience.”

— Colin Firth

66. “I’d love to try my hand at something else.”

— Colin Firth

67. “I think the dictator director is based upon stories from the past. I don’t think anyone would put up with it now. There are a lot of people on a film set with egos. So, to be completely authoritarian, you’d probably have to have a reputation like Kurosowa or somebody to get away with it.”

— Colin Firth

68. “Some people come up to be directors by coming through the camera department and there’s not a lot of women in the camera department. The ones that are have to kind of prove they’re one of the boys, I think. I don’t want to get into trouble with generalisations but I think it’s a fair observation.”

— Colin Firth

69. “I do also think it eludes genre a bit – not in any groundbreaking way but you can’t quite call it a comedy and you can’t quite call it a romantic anything. It’s not quite a drama either really. But it has elements of all those things.”

— Colin Firth

70. “So, I think there’s a danger that good stuff can fall by the wayside if it doesn’t conform to formula. But I think it comes down to money and they just don’t know where it’s going if they haven’t got any precedent.”

— Colin Firth

71. “I thought I was managing my expectations, but on hearing the news I discovered new and unfamiliar vocal tones. Perhaps I should do another musical.”

— Colin Firth

72. “My primary instinct as an actor is not the big transformation. It’s thrilling if a performer can do that well, but that’s not me. Often with actors, it’s a case of witnessing a big party piece but wondering afterwards, where’s the substance?”

— Colin Firth

73. “Hollywood hasn’t aggressively pursued me. Neither have I aggressively pursued Hollywood.”

— Colin Firth

74. “But it’s interesting being directed by someone who is a very good actor. There’s nothing like it. It might sound like a territorial thing about what I do, but I don’t think you can understand what it is until you’ve done it. I know that to be a fact.”

— Colin Firth

75. “The Hollywood Foreign Press have just given me a time out from my 20-year midlife crisis. My heartfelt thanks to them.”

— Colin Firth

76. “People have the idea of missionaries as going out with the Bible and hitting natives with it. It’s not really what they were doing. They were all doing something rather different.”

— Colin Firth

77. “The skill of a good actor is to make it always seem like you’re in that fantastically spontaneous moment. Very often, a stand-up comedian has a different instinct, which is to reinvent. Once you’ve laid down some material, and made them laugh, you move on and find some new material.”

— Colin Firth

78. “It didn’t have to be a newfound respect for the craft, I knew that it’s notoriously difficult and frightens a lot of people off. I don’t think anyone knows quite who to attribute it to, but the dying actor who says: “dying is easy, comedy is hard.” I hear it.”

— Colin Firth

79. “I don’t think it’s aiming at gags, I think the humour is woven into it. It’s part of how the characters operate and how they deal with disaster because they’re worldly enough to have a bit of irony and wryness about their own circumstances. So, I think the humour comes out of that.”

— Colin Firth

80. “I think it helps to get a film made because people who put money in are nervous. They like to have something recognisable enough to make them secure that there’s a pattern there – that someone else put their money into something like this and made it back.”

— Colin Firth

81. “I think that London is very much like that. I find there’s humour in the air and people are interesting. And I think that it’s a place which is constantly surprising. The worst thing about it? I think it can be smug and aggressive.”

— Colin Firth

82. “To work effectively in a film, you have to repeat and work consistently. Basically, you shoot a big master then you do close-ups. You’re supposed to be in the same moment, the same 30-second moment, for a day.”

— Colin Firth

83. “I’m just the last English twit, really.”

— Colin Firth