The greater your powers of self-delusion, the greater will be the apparent efficacy of this untruth.

Where I come from, it was a heresy to say you wanted to be in movies, leave alone American movies.

I'm not keen on history being tampered with... to any extent.

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

Perhaps I'm particularly serious, because I'm not unaware of the potential absurdity of what I'm doing.

Be grateful, be grateful, be grateful.

How people are around a director, it really does affect everything, every detail of the life of the movie. Daniel Day-Lewis

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 have no role models. Many heroes. I have an enormous capacity for hero worship.

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.

I have always been intrigued by these lives I have never experienced.

I'm woefully one-track-minded.

I don't do all of this as an indulgence. I do it because I'm not a good enough actor to not do it.

I spend many months in apparently listless rumination out of which I hope something will emerge.

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

It's easy to love humanity when you're this far away from it.

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

I'm a little bit perverse, and I just hate doing the thing that's the most obvious.

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 toward it.