Top 35 Jeremy Irons Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “It’s just money; it’s made up. Pieces of paper with pictures on it so we don’t have to kill each other just to get something to eat.”

— Jeremy Irons

2. “We all have our time machines. Some take us back, they’re called memories. Some take us forward, they’re called dreams.”

— Jeremy Irons

3. “I succeeded on sort of chutzpah and charm. No technique at all, didn’t know what I was doing, but it worked and the character suited me.”

— Jeremy Irons

4. “I constantly experience failure in that my work is never as good as I want it to be. So I live with failure.”

— Jeremy Irons

5. “Most people are robust. If a man puts his hand on a woman’s bottom, any woman worth her salt can deal with it. It’s communication. Can’t we be friendly?”

— Jeremy Irons

6. “Could a father not marry his son?”

— Jeremy Irons

7. “I get bored very easily, so I love doing different things, changing, doing a job for a month and then doing another one for six months and then moving into a different group of people. I love being able to stop. That’s one of the greatest benefits we have in our profession.”

— Jeremy Irons

8. “I’ve never been passionate about acting, and I find more and more that I work to live the life I want to live. There’s something about the detachment I have, the feeling of the lack of importance about what I do, that is healthy.”

— Jeremy Irons

9. “And whenever I’m in a situation where I’m wearing the same as 600 other people and doing the same thing as 600 other people, looking back, I always found ways to make myself different, whether it be having a red lining inside of my jacket, having red shoes, it hasn’t changed.”

— Jeremy Irons

10. “So the better my partner or my opposition, however you like to think about it, the better my game.”

— Jeremy Irons

11. “You think, you don’t just speak. The lines come off the thoughts.”

— Jeremy Irons

12. “I was educated in a private school in England amongst people who had been trained for sort of banking or the Army or business. As I came towards the end of my education, I thought I must find something or I’ll never meet any of these people again.”

— Jeremy Irons

13. “One always returns to the fact that there are just too many of us, the population continues to rise and it’s unsustainable.”

— Jeremy Irons

14. “I envy children who know that they’re going to become doctors, know they’re going to go into the forces or whatever. I think choice is one of the hardest things, but that’s what I try to give my children, to say you can do anything.”

— Jeremy Irons

15. “I love being part of a group who tells stories, whether it be in the theater or in cinema, and I love creating imaginary worlds rather as children do, but I never had a burning desire to act, but it just sort of suited me.”

— Jeremy Irons

16. “I’m very glad I’m not a politician. I think it’s one step away from the gates of hell, being a politician. I really do. It’s a nightmare.”

— Jeremy Irons

17. “Sadly, one’s parameters are constantly narrowed by one’s success.”

— Jeremy Irons

18. “Now in my theater training I showed no aptitude at all.”

— Jeremy Irons

19. “I was not naturally intellectual, but somebody whose interest had to be whetted, still the case sadly.”

— Jeremy Irons

20. “The sad thing about any business I suppose, but in mine you see it particularly, is that you’re always asked to do what you’ve already done.”

— Jeremy Irons

21. “It’s always great to play a man who sets himself up to be punctured.”

— Jeremy Irons

22. “Because I’m now successful, what I’m being offered as an actor is more and more of the same.”

— Jeremy Irons

23. “I think I would not be described as a character actor in that I don’t take on characteristics which are very alien to me.”

— Jeremy Irons

24. “So nevertheless, what I’m saying is that what one is – one’s parameters are constantly narrowed by one’s success, and my desire is to widen my field even if I risk failure.”

— Jeremy Irons

25. “And trust, yes, which is important, but that is what I aim towards. Now that is difficult for some people, and with that desire to get things as good as possible, I would say that I’m probably regarded as quite prickly to work with.”

— Jeremy Irons

26. “What I try to do as an actor is constantly find that, find ways to risk, find opportunities to fall on my face if it’s going to be worth it, and then maybe I’ll surprise myself.”

— Jeremy Irons

27. “I liked the theater. I liked the people. I liked the time that we worked.”

— Jeremy Irons

28. “Actors often behave like children, and so we’re taken for children. I want to be grown up.”

— Jeremy Irons

29. “My father was a CPA. He worked hard in the aircraft industry, and would come home more and more infrequently. He was about to leave my mother, which he did when I was 15.”

— Jeremy Irons

30. “Godspell was a good leap for me, it was a good shop window.”

— Jeremy Irons

31. “An acting assistant stage manager in a theater in Canterbury, a rep theater. A small wage but just enough to get by on, and I made props and I walked on, and I changed scenery, and I realized that I just loved it.”

— Jeremy Irons

32. “At age 10 or 12 he’s going to boarding school in the Isle of Wight. The Isle of Wight is, of course, down at the bottom of England just off South Hampton.”

— Jeremy Irons

33. “I was the youngest. The yule lamb. The one who always got away without doing the washing up. My sister was four years older, and my brother six years.”

— Jeremy Irons

34. “Americans enjoy uniformity in a way that the British don’t; they wanted everybody of a sort of nice chorus line height and here I was, this person who was a good three inches taller than anyone else on the end of the line.”

— Jeremy Irons

35. “Anywhere I can ski in the morning and sell a movie in the afternoon is good.”

— Jeremy Irons

36. “I had done a fair bit of traveling during the holidays in my school days with my guitar and discovered that I could live on it. Admittedly, I traveled with a sleeping bag but I could always find somewhere to lay my head.”

— Jeremy Irons

37. “A trip to the mainland was a big event and happened maybe once a year, although now you can get across in a speed boat in seven minutes but then it was a long way away.”

— Jeremy Irons

38. “The secret to life is timing.”

— Jeremy Irons