Top 100 Daniel Day-Lewis Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I’m woefully one-track-minded.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

52. “I became conflicted in my late teens.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

53. “God knows, I haven’t always been successful.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

54. “I love to sit and watch people. I love to sit and listen to people.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

55. “You don’t merely give over your creativity to making a film – you give over your life! In theatre, by contrast, you live these two rather strange lives simultaneously; you have no option but to confront the mould on last night’s washing-up.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

56. “I’d always felt very strongly in the power of vocation.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

57. “To people who don’t know me I’m defined by a number of things that people know about me that are entirely untrue.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

58. “Ireland was a place for the renewal of hope and I still see it like that.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

59. “I have always been intrigued by these lives I have never experienced.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

60. “I didn’t like the idea of being foolish, but I learned pretty soon that it was essential to fail and be foolish.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

61. “I would wish for any one of my colleagues to have the experience of working with Martin Scorsese once in their lifetime.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

62. “I like to cook things very slowly.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

63. “It didn’t occur to me that it was possible to breathe life into Abraham Lincoln.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

64. “I was a savage for so many years of my life. There was some seed of determination in me that I was not conscious of. I was mostly consciously getting into trouble and drunk.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

65. “How can you be a recluse in a house full of children, even if you had the inclination to be, which I don’t?”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

66. “Where I come from, it was a heresy to say you wanted to be in movies, leave alone American movies.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

67. “The one thing that I appear to have been given, bearing in mind that I am capable of being very, very scatty and extremely lazy, is the ability to concentrate on something I choose to give my time to.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

68. “Periodically over the years I’ve always taken periods of time away from acting.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

69. “I broke things to get attention.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

70. “I can’t honestly account for the very personal response that I have to one story and not another, a sense of an orbit, the orbit of a world that draws me as my own life recedes.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

71. “I see a lot of movies. I love films as a spectator, and that’s never obscured by the part of me that does the work myself. I just love going to the movies.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

72. “As actors, we’re all encouraged to feel that each job is the last job. They plant some little electrode in your head at an early stage and you think, ‘Be grateful, be grateful, be grateful.’”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

73. “You’ve just provided me with the makings of one hell of a weekend in Dublin.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

74. “I avoid talking about the way I work. But in avoiding it I seem only to have encouraged people to focus their fantasies about me in an ever more fantastical way.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

75. “Films exhaust me, they do, and I often want nothing more to do with them, but I’m continually surprised at the resurgence of the impulse to come back and do it all over again.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

76. “You can never fully put your finger on the reason why you’re suddenly, inexplicably compelled to explore one life as opposed to another.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

77. “England is obsessed with where you came from, and they are determined to keep you in that place, be it in a drawing room or in the gutter.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

78. “I’m not really a storyteller myself – I tend to get all tangled up when I try and tell stories.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

79. “I don’t deal at all well with the relative amount of stuff I have to face already.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

80. “My curiosity sustains me for the period of the shoot.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

81. “I depleted myself to the point where I had nothing left.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

82. “When I’ve gone back to work, it’s always with that sense of inevitability. That may be a complete delusion, but it’s the one that I need to get out of bed and go about my business. That sense that I can’t avoid this thing. I better just get on with it.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

83. “I never retreat from films, as it were, I simply indulge in other interests, that’s all.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

84. “I’m very often still very much alive for that other being and that other world long after the film is finished.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

85. “The last time I was on a small set would’ve been probably My Left Foot.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

86. “I’ve been very lucky.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

87. “I still relate to my father very much. I mean, I talk to him in a certain way, as we do talk to the dead.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

88. “I’m not actually a big musical fan.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

89. “There are always practical decisions to be made about any character you’re playing.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

90. “I feel less often compelled to do the work than I was in the past.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

91. “Very often there’s this misapprehension about actors being people that need to display themselves, to reveal themselves in public.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

92. “My preference is that, that day when someone sticks a tripod in front of you with a camera on the top, it is not day one.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

93. “As a member of the audience I don’t like it that I can’t see what’s going on in the eyes and in the face and in the most subtle responses of a performer when I’m more than a few rows back. I find it very frustrating.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

94. “I’m not sure you learn anything on film sets.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

95. “The whole thing of weight, I guess it’s because there is a wider fascination we all have with weight.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

96. “I suppose the place where I live is fairly remote, it would seem remote to some people.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

97. “If you remain unsettled by a piece of writing, it means you are not watching the story from the outside; you’ve already taken a step towards it.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

98. “I had a very vivid, almost hallucinatory moment in which I was engaged in a dialogue with my father.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

99. “Film has become such a central part of our culture now that I think sometimes too great a weight is placed upon it in terms of scrutiny and analysis. There’s a lot of rather specious professorial stuff that swirls around films.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis

100. “I can’t re-examine work I did in the past with pride.”

— Daniel Day-Lewis