Top 35 Damian Lewis Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “People need revelation, and then they need resolution.”

— Damian Lewis

2. “I’ve always had a ‘Work hard, play hard’ attitude to life – I still do – but sometimes you get involved in something that needs a calm, methodical approach.”

— Damian Lewis

3. “You know what it’s like to feel anxious – it’s horrible feeling anxious. It’s stressful having that feeling, having butterflies in your stomach, even for a day, and you don’t sleep at night.”

— Damian Lewis

4. “It’s certainly true that I was brought up in that British amateur tradition, the one which always held that if you were reasonably good at cricket, knew one or two Latin texts and a few zingy Oscar Wilde quotes for dinner parties, you were pretty much ready to go and run some outpost in Hindustan.”

— Damian Lewis

5. “You know, I think I am faintly spiritual.”

— Damian Lewis

6. “I was, if you like, a successful schoolboy in that I had a degree of talent in all the required things that make you a success at school.”

— Damian Lewis

7. “I love playing sport.”

— Damian Lewis

8. “In England we burnt redheads at the stake, because we thought they were witches. There are still young redheads in Britain getting ripped for having red hair. ‘Oy, Ginger!’”

— Damian Lewis

9. “Quiet people, people who arent given to emotional outbursts, people who are economic with words – theyre also fun to play, but you find yourself needing a laser precision in those roles. Otherwise you just sort of stand around, looking slightly brain-dead. You worry about being uninteresting.”

— Damian Lewis

10. “A cricket ball broke my nose when I was a kid so I couldn’t breath through it. Before I had it operated on I used to stand on stage with my mouth slightly open.”

— Damian Lewis

11. “Seeing a man praying to Allah is enough for some people to assume he is a terrorist.”

— Damian Lewis

12. “Dramatically it’s always more interesting to conceal rather than reveal things.”

— Damian Lewis

13. “I love going for a swim. Growing up in England, anywhere with a pool seems like the height of glamour to me.”

— Damian Lewis

14. “I don’t believe Jesus was the son of God, although I’m inclined to think he might have been a great prophet.”

— Damian Lewis

15. “I’ve done classical theaters. I played Hamlet myself and Romeo.”

— Damian Lewis

16. “You just have to take control of your own performance.”

— Damian Lewis

17. “You can’t do something that is morally vacuous or dysfunctional and then write it off saying, ‘It wasn’t my film, I was just doing a job in it.’”

— Damian Lewis

18. “It’s an unfair comparison because when things are developed in the UK, they’re developed at script stage only.”

— Damian Lewis

19. “It’s good to be busy on a film set because there is a lot of sitting around, so if you’ve got two roles to play at one time, then that’s great to do.”

— Damian Lewis

20. “No Western government has ever played the long-term in terms of foreign policy.”

— Damian Lewis

21. “My parents were incredibly inclusive.”

— Damian Lewis

22. “I think you can’t be really posh and be an interesting actor. I’m a bit of a posh rough.”

— Damian Lewis

23. “Acting can be a narrow and isolated experience, because you only examine your particular part.”

— Damian Lewis

24. “I think people like to be scared. I think people like tension and suspense in a movie.”

— Damian Lewis

25. “I’d lived in LA for two years and I said to my agent that I wouldn’t do any more network TV, because my family and I had just made the decision to live in England. It would be a whole year in LA shooting network TV.”

— Damian Lewis

26. “I’ve had loss in my life, and I like to think my mother’s energy lives on in some faintly Buddhist way. I do find some comfort there.”

— Damian Lewis

27. “Theres something important, as an actor, about allowing yourself to be approached by people to do roles. People see different things in you.”

— Damian Lewis

28. “You know, this idea of going around the world imposing democracy by growing a middle-class, a trading merchant class that is independent of your faith, is a good notion, but we’re all partially different – it’s no good imposing systems on people that it doesn’t suit.”

— Damian Lewis

29. “Temperamentally I’m not a natural producer, because I don’t have the patience.”

— Damian Lewis

30. “I have a three-year-old and a four-year-old at home, and my mornings are about just dealing with the fact of that. I oddly enjoy it.”

— Damian Lewis

31. “I want to make a clear distinction between people who take acting seriously and people who call themselves actors because theyve been on reality TV or something.”

— Damian Lewis

32. “I guess I’m just good at playing repressed individuals. I’m lucky because those are often the roles that catch people’s eyes.”

— Damian Lewis

33. “My heroes were all in the theatre.”

— Damian Lewis

34. “You have to go where the good writing is.”

— Damian Lewis

35. “For me the rehearsal period is the part I most enjoy. It’s the creating of the story.”

— Damian Lewis

36. “In the end, there’s something of the puritan work ethic about me that roles really must sustain me on an intellectual level.”

— Damian Lewis