Day-Lewis: "I live in a landscape, which every single day of my life is enriching."

Day-Lewis: "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."

Day-Lewis: "Everybody has to know for themselves what they're capable of."

Day-Lewis: "I suppose I have a highly developed capacity for self-delusion, so it's no problem for me to believe that I'm somebody else!"

Day-Lewis: "If people take an interest in you and they think there's half a chance, they might hang on. It's dreadful."

Day-Lewis: "You can never fully put your finger on the reason why you're suddenly, inexplicably compelled to explore one life as opposed to another."

Day-Lewis: "A voice is such a deep, personal reflection of character."

Day-Lewis: "Very often there's this misapprehension about actors being people that need to display themselves, to reveal themselves in public."

Day-Lewis: "I'm woefully one-track-minded."

Day-Lewis: "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."

Day-Lewis: "At some point in your life, if you're lucky, you get to design the way in which things evolve."

Day-Lewis: "I avoid talking about the way I work. But in avoiding it I seem only to have encouraged people to focus their fantasies about me in an ever more fantastical way."

Day-Lewis: "I'm a warrior when it comes to pursuing roles."

Day-Lewis: "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."

Day-Lewis: "Well, we all have murderous thoughts throughout the day, if not the week."

Day-Lewis: "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."

Day-Lewis: "I like to learn about things."

Day-Lewis: "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."

Day-Lewis: "I'm a little bit perverse, and I just hate doing the thing that's the most obvious."

Day-Lewis: "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."

Day-Lewis: "I didn't like the idea of being foolish, but I learned pretty soon that it was essential to fail and be foolish."

Day-Lewis: "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."

Day-Lewis: "I have always been intrigued by these lives I have never experienced."

Day-Lewis: "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."

Day-Lewis: "I just knew at an early time in my life how important privacy was."

Day-Lewis: "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."

Day-Lewis: "Actors should never give interviews."

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."

Day-Lewis: "I'm not sure you learn anything on film sets."