Daniel Day-Lewis

It is awesome to feel you are carrying on the family name.

One of the great privileges of having grown up in a middle-class literary English household, but having gone to school in the front lines in Southeast London, was that I became half-street-urchin and half-good-boy at home. I knew that dichotomy was possible.

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.

I had a very vivid, almost hallucinatory moment in which I was engaged in a dialogue with my father.

Periodically over the years I've always taken periods of time away from acting.

I hate wasting people's time.

The last time I was on a small set would've been probably My Left Foot.

There must've been some part of me that wanted to make my mark. But there was never a defining moment.

I think I have a strange relationship with time. I'm not really aware of that time passing. I don't feel that I'm wasteful with time. But I'm not aware of it passing.

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.

Being at the centre of a film is a burden one takes on with innocence the first time. Thereafter, you take it on with trepidation.