Daniel Day-Lewis Quotes
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I would like to have children while I've still got the energy. But then I have the feeling that when I have children I'll stop performing in the same way, because you don't really need to perform if you have children.
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At a certain age it just became apparent to me that this was probably the work that I would have to do.
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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.
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I don't torture myself. And I do the work because of the pleasure involved. I'm satisfying a compulsion I find nigh-on irresistible. It's not necessarily because of the work itself. I just feel the need for a period of regeneration afterwards. Like leaving a field fallow when you've grazed too much on it. I feel depleted.
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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.'
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I spend many months in apparently listless rumination out of which I hope something will emerge.
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Everybody has to know for themselves what they're capable of.
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I hate the domestic life.
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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.
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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.
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Ireland was a place for the renewal of hope and I still see it like that.
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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.
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I suppose it's a very highly developed form of denial, but some part of me completely denies that I'm a performer.
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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.
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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.
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I don't feel my son should pay the price for what I do.
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I feel less often compelled to do the work than I was in the past.
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Actors should never give interviews.
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I have a strange relationship with time. I'm not aware of it passing.
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I suppose that anyone who does any kind of creative work some time in their life - especially as you grow into middle age! - you come to a time where you really question more and more frequently, whether you have anything else to offer. And at its worst, you feel utterly bereft of whatever creative force it takes to do that work.
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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.
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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.
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Be grateful, be grateful, be grateful.
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The more articulate somebody is, the more suspicious I am of them. I like to feel that the important things remain unsaid.
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The last time I was on a small set would've been probably My Left Foot.
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If you have a milkshake and I have a milkshake, and I have a straw and my straw reaches across the room and starts to drink your milkshake... I drink your milkshake! I drink it up!
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There are always practical decisions to be made about any character you're playing.
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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.
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I'm not keen on history being tampered with... to any extent.
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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.
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