Top 70 Ralph Fiennes Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Education, awareness and prevention are the key, but stigmatisation and exclusion from family is what makes people suffer most.”

— Ralph Fiennes

2. “We’d all like to believe that perhaps people could stop killing each other.”

— Ralph Fiennes

3. “The sets were fantastic. The Harry Potter sets are brilliant. You do get transported for a second.”

— Ralph Fiennes

4. “Success is all about being able to extend love to people. The people I consider successful are so because of how they handle their responsibilities to other people, how they approach the future, people who have a full sense of the value of their life and what they want to do with it.”

— Ralph Fiennes

5. “Unicef wants to encourage a sense of stability for a child.”

— Ralph Fiennes

6. “As an actor, there’s a bit of you that’s decided you want to be looked at and watched, but there’s a paradoxical bit that wants to run away.”

— Ralph Fiennes

7. “Gardeners are good at nurturing, and they have a great quality of patience, they’re tender. They have to be persistent.”

— Ralph Fiennes

8. “I guess I’d love to be surprised by something I had never thought of.”

— Ralph Fiennes

9. “If I had a gun to my head and I had to choose between theater and film I’d choose theater.”

— Ralph Fiennes

10. “I have grown up loving Shakespeare.”

— Ralph Fiennes

11. “He’s really sort of the devil. He’s completely emotionally detached. He has no empathy. You find that in psychopaths. It’s about power with Voldemort. It’s an aphrodisiac for him. Power makes him feel alive.”

— Ralph Fiennes

12. “I went out to Mount Kilimanjaro, which I thought was very beautiful, but there were a lot of people there.”

— Ralph Fiennes

13. “One of the things that binds us as a family is a shared sense of humor.”

— Ralph Fiennes

14. “When you meet women, don’t pretend to be anything that you’re not.”

— Ralph Fiennes

15. “God is not anything human. God is a force, God is chaos, God is unknown. God is terror and enlightenment at the same time.”

— Ralph Fiennes

16. “Little moments can have a feeling and a texture that is very real.”

— Ralph Fiennes

17. “I’m not very good at being domesticated. I’ve tried. The domestic life I find claustrophobic – the rituals and habits and patterns.”

— Ralph Fiennes

18. “When she was younger, my mother was quite committed to Roman Catholicism. But she got disillusioned with it and moved closer to something like Buddhist beliefs near the end of her life.”

— Ralph Fiennes

19. “Within the process of filming, unexpected situations occur.”

— Ralph Fiennes

20. “Awards are like applause, and every actor likes to hear applause.”

— Ralph Fiennes

21. “I veer away from trying to understand why I act. I just know I need to do it.”

— Ralph Fiennes

22. “You have to just dive over the edge. You haven’t got time to mess about.”

— Ralph Fiennes

23. “Unicef’s education initiative does not seek to impose, but to initiate and integrate. It does, however, aim to address the huge bias towards education for boys at the expense of girls in so many cultures.”

— Ralph Fiennes

24. “Ridicule is also a weapon against forces of evil. Really clever, intelligent ridicule.”

— Ralph Fiennes

25. “In Shakespeare, keep it simple. Don’t over-inflect. The speech needs to be naturalistic and simple and accessible as much as possible.”

— Ralph Fiennes

26. “There are those moments when you shake someone’s hand, have a conversation with someone, and suddenly your all bound together because you share your humanity in one simple moment.”

— Ralph Fiennes

27. “I loved doing Harry Potter. I had a great time on that. And I think it’s good to have a mix. I think you’re learning all the time.”

— Ralph Fiennes

28. “There is a tension in relationships between wanting to return to the womb, but also wanting to be free. Because sometimes the woman’s attentions can be overly maternal, and you want to go, ‘Ahhhh!’”

— Ralph Fiennes

29. “Voldemort? That might be real.”

— Ralph Fiennes

30. “In the studio system, things are expected of a film. By the first, second, third act, there’s a generic language that comes out of the more commercial system.”

— Ralph Fiennes

31. “The actor shouldn’t edit themselves or be anxious. And the actors that I admire are always the ones who are inventive and their imaginative life in free-willing. It’s a director’s job to go, “No here, don’t do that, go there.””

— Ralph Fiennes

32. “I never studied anything about film technique in school. Eventually, I realized that cinema and theater are not so different: from the gut to the heart to the head of a character is the same journey for both.”

— Ralph Fiennes

33. “There’s a lot of people who feel there’s a tabloid journalist who had it coming.”

— Ralph Fiennes

34. “You’re meant to be playing the distillation of evil, which can be anything.”

— Ralph Fiennes

35. “I was grateful to have two weeks to shoot this one scene in Harry Potter. It’s a big, big scene, but they have to deliver. And they have high expectations.”

— Ralph Fiennes

36. “I think Shakespeare is like a dialect. If I heard a broad Scots accent, I’d probably struggle at first but then I’d start to look for words I recognise and I’d get the gist. I think Shakespeare is like that.”

— Ralph Fiennes

37. “The film depends on the audience’s belief in this relationship.”

— Ralph Fiennes

38. “There is a humanitarian impulse that one aspires to and there are days when one doesn’t do it very well.”

— Ralph Fiennes

39. “I learned a lot about acting – watching not just myself but other actors and learning how to distinguish between two great takes. It’s also about one’s own taste in performance.”

— Ralph Fiennes

40. “I don’t feel I’m playing villains all the time.”

— Ralph Fiennes

41. “In the best material, you always should be able to somehow make a case for a story to be transposed to any other time.”

— Ralph Fiennes

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

42. “I got to read some writings by serial killers, and they got inside my head. They were quite disturbing. I read disturbing stuff about that very detached way of manipulating people to do things.”

— Ralph Fiennes

43. “I admire the world of the books and the characters that she’s created, but I’m not an addict of Harry Potter. I don’t feel possessive about it.”

— Ralph Fiennes

44. “When I first filmed things, they were always slightly awkward.”

— Ralph Fiennes

45. “And although I’ve been very fortunate in the film work that’s come my way, I need to get back to the stage. If I’m away for a maximum of two years, I feel something’s wrong.”

— Ralph Fiennes

46. “There’s a challenge to playing these fantasy figures because they are fantasy figures. You have to enter into this sort of imaginative world of the writer.”

— Ralph Fiennes

47. “I’ve never felt fallow in the sense that there’s been no work.”

— Ralph Fiennes

48. “I’m interested in the spirits of people. In the theatre, there’s the acting part of acting – and I’m not saying that can’t be great – and there’s the essence. To explore that essence, you need a key, a look, a gesture, an insight that unlocks the person’s soul.”

— Ralph Fiennes

49. “I certainly gained a lot by reading about Shanghai.”

— Ralph Fiennes

Featured in: Reading Quotes

50. “I like to keep fit, but I never lift very heavy weights.”

— Ralph Fiennes