Top 100 Daniel Day-Lewis Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The more articulate somebody is, the more suspicious I am of them. I like to feel that the important things remain unsaid.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

2. “A voice is such a deep, personal reflection of character.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

3. “I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed. I hate most people.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

4. “At some point in your life, if you’re lucky, you get to design the way in which things evolve.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

5. “Everybody has to know for themselves what they’re capable of.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

6. “It is awesome to feel you are carrying on the family name.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

7. “Acting is about people. Other people. Otherwise, you’re not acting, you’re doing monologues.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

8. “I just knew at an early time in my life how important privacy was.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

9. “Be grateful, be grateful, be grateful.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

10. “Actors should never give interviews.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

Featured in: Quotes About Actors

11. “I live in a landscape, which every single day of my life is enriching.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

12. “Perhaps I’m particularly serious, because I’m not unaware of the potential absurdity of what I’m doing.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

13. “I’m a little bit perverse, and I just hate doing the thing that’s the most obvious.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

14. “Germans don’t speak in a German accent, they just speak German.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

15. “I don’t like to rehearse. And I couldn’t understand how you could go through eight weeks of rehearsal, without exhausting every possibility. To the point where, you know, you would just lie gasping on the floor!”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

16. “I come from not just a household but a country where the finesse of language, well-balanced sentence, structure, syntax, these things are driven into us, and my parents, bless them, are great custodians of the English language.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

17. “I like things that make you grit your teeth. I like tucking my chin in and sort of leading into the storm. I like that feeling. I like it a lot.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

18. “It’s easy to love humanity when you’re this far away from it.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

19. “I hate wasting people’s time.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

20. “I hate the domestic life.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

21. “My main memories of my father are of his illness.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

22. “I suppose it’s a very highly developed form of denial, but some part of me completely denies that I’m a performer.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

23. “For about a year, I just didn’t know what to do. I did laboring jobs, working in the docks, construction sites.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

24. “I spend many months in apparently listless rumination out of which I hope something will emerge.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

25. “A lot of guys in jail tattoo their hands.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

26. “There’s nothing worse than finding yourself in a situation, a very demanding piece of work, and knowing that you’re not a true ally to the person who’s in charge of all that.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

27. “I suppose I have a highly developed capacity for self-delusion, so it’s no problem for me to believe that I’m somebody else.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

28. “The West has always been the epicentre of possibility. One of the ways we forge against mortality is to head west. It’s to do with catching the sun before it slips behind the horizon.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

29. “I have a strange relationship with time. I’m not aware of it passing.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

30. “In all fields of creativity you see the result of work that has become habit. Where the creative impulse has become flaccid or has died out altogether, and yet because it is our work and our life we continue to do it.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

31. “One of the great privileges of having grown up in a middle-class literary English household, but having gone to school in the front lines in Southeast London, was that I became half-street-urchin and half-good-boy at home. I knew that dichotomy was possible.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

32. “Leaving a role is a terrible sadness. The last day of the shooting is surreal. Your soul, your body and your mind are not ready at all to see the end of this experience. In the following months after a film shoot, one feels a deep sense of void.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

33. “I’m not picky, quite honestly.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

34. “I’ve got a serious-looking head.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

35. “I find it easier to work when it’s quiet.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

36. “It’s a source of great sadness to me that my father died without having seen me do anything worthwhile. He was constantly having to make excuses for me.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

37. “I think some actors thrive on working at a much greater pace than I do.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

38. “When I was younger, I made some decisions that I shouldn’t have. And, in hindsight, I’ve almost always been wrong when I haven’t listened to myself.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

39. “The word Amendment itself is an encouraging thing, isn’t it? Because an amendment, it tells of a system of government that allows for the improvement of itself. Just move forward a little bit, one day at a time.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

40. “I find it difficult to be in rooms now for long periods of time. I can usually take it for about an hour. Then I stride out.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

41. “I’m a warrior when it comes to pursuing roles.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

42. “I don’t torture myself.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

43. “Just stay alive, no matter what occurs! I will find you. No matter how long it takes, no matter how far. I will find you!”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

44. “Shoes are strange things. If you take your shoes off in a situation in which you’re vulnerable, you’ll feel 10 times more vulnerable.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

45. “If you have a certain wildness of spirit, a cabinet maker’s workshop is not the place to express it.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

46. “Quite honestly, if I were doing work related to a living being or historical being where there was visual or audio recordings available, I would find that extremely difficult because I don’t know how you would avoid the process of mimicry. And mimicry, to me at any rate, is a very dull prospect.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

47. “When I did make the decision to focus on acting, I think my mother was just relieved for me that I had finally started to focus.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

48. “I don’t know what impression you might have of the way I live. I live in a quiet place. I do not live as a hermit, though other people would prefer it if I did.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

49. “Being at the centre of a film is a burden one takes on with innocence the first time. Thereafter, you take it on with trepidation.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

50. “I don’t feel my son should pay the price for what I do.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis