Daniel Day-Lewis

My curiosity sustains me for the period of the shoot.

My main memories of my father are of his illness.

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'd always felt very strongly in the power of vocation.

For about a year, I just didn't know what to do. I did laboring jobs, working in the docks, construction sites.

Making a film, setting it up and getting it cast and getting it together, is not an easy thing.

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

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.

If you have a certain wildness of spirit, a cabinet maker's workshop is not the place to express it.

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.

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.

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.