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
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.
I live in a landscape, which every single day of my life is enriching.
My main memories of my father are of his illness.
I'm not really a storyteller myself - I tend to get all tangled up when I try and tell stories.
How can you be a recluse in a house full of children, even if you had the inclination to be, which I don't?
At some point in your life, if you're lucky, you get to design the way in which things evolve.
A lot of guys in jail tattoo their hands.
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.
I'm not sure you learn anything on film sets.
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.
I'd always felt very strongly in the power of vocation.
I'm a warrior when it comes to pursuing roles.
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.
I've got a serious-looking head.
There are always practical decisions to be made about any character you're playing.
I became conflicted in my late teens.
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.'
I suppose it's a very highly developed form of denial, but some part of me completely denies that I'm a performer.
I love what I do.
I don't deal at all well with the relative amount of stuff I have to face already.
I can't re-examine work I did in the past with pride.
Actors should never give interviews.
I like to cook things very slowly.
I depleted myself to the point where I had nothing left.
It must be hard interviewing actors.
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.
I never retreat from films, as it were, I simply indulge in other interests, that's all.
I hate the domestic life.
I broke things to get attention.
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.
Periodically over the years I've always taken periods of time away from acting.
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.
It didn't occur to me that it was possible to breathe life into Abraham Lincoln.
I like to learn about things.
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.
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.
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.
Ireland was a place for the renewal of hope and I still see it like that.
I have a strange relationship with time. I'm not aware of it passing.
To people who don't know me I'm defined by a number of things that people know about me that are entirely untrue.
I had a very vivid, almost hallucinatory moment in which I was engaged in a dialogue with my father.
I don't torture myself.
When I do work, I feel the same sort of urgency as I ever did. If I didn't feel that, I don't think I would wish to be doing it. I wouldn't really see the point.
I don't feel my son should pay the price for what I do.
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.
It is awesome to feel you are carrying on the family name.
Very often there's this misapprehension about actors being people that need to display themselves, to reveal themselves in public.
I'm woefully one-track-minded.
For about a year, I just didn't know what to do. I did laboring jobs, working in the docks, construction sites.
