David Thewlis Quotes

It's very hard to write a story with only one character. This is because readers want to see your protagonist interacting with others. We come to know people through their interpersonal relations. Even Jack London, in his classic short story 'To Build A Fire,' gave his lone Arctic explorer a dog so that the character would have someone to talk to.

My tutors at drama school commended and criticised my use of comedy in my acting for a long time at drama school. They said I had a tendency to somehow perform the most tragic of scenes in a slightly flippant way.

Without game, men prey on each other.

Cruelty is a part of nature, at least of human nature, but it is the one thing that seems unnatural to us.

When the drama attains a characterization which makes the play a revelation of human conduct and a dialogue which characterizes yet pleases for itself, we reach dramatic literature.

People are violent by nature. That’s why we rule the earth; we beat the crap out of everyone else.

I think that's just a natural instinct as an actor is that you want to just keep exploring humanity and finding different facets of it.

I don't watch anything of mine much. I haven't gone to drama school, or college, either. I just like to watch other actors in action. I learned so much from working with De Niro. I'd be in a scene with him where I was supposed to be acting, and I was just watching.

To get a connection to your characters, you have to put them in a situation that you can feel yourself.

I'm a big believer in writing really good dialogue.

Listen, baby, people do funny things. Specially us. The cards are stacked against us and just trying to stay in the game, stay alive and in the game, makes us do funny things. Things we can't help. Things that make us hurt one another. We don't even know why.

All of my friends at drama school were still sat on the floor doing voice exercises and I was doing scenes with David Tennant and Catherine Tate.

I never improvise. I create the character and transform into it.

An actor's job is to find variations of the same emotion in his being so that every time he expresses grief or joy, it doesn't look the same.

As an actor, you create a character from your understanding of what you have heard and your observations. Eventually, every film is an extension of the images that I have seen or what I have heard or read somewhere.

When I read interviews with people like Kevin Barry or Colin Barrett, who I hugely admire, they don't really seem to come up against the question of likeability even though their characters, in some instances, are really horrible.

God and nature have thrown all human fortunes into the midst of mankind; and they are thus attainable rather by rapine than by industry, by wicked actions rather than by good. Hence it is that men feed upon each other, and those who cannot defend themselves must be worried.

The trouble is, the same thing that enabled us to survive evolution is also going to kill us, because in the final analysis, if survival is the primary motivation of every human being, then we will finally be in a situation where might will make right and only one person will survive.

Whether the bear beats the wolf or the wolf beats the bear, the rabbit always loses.

The rat was merely trying to sleep. Believe me, pup, if I had wanted to kill you we wouldn’t be having this conversation,” said Ripred.

This is the strange way of the world, that people who simply want to love are instead forced to become warriors.

Man, one may say, was never in such a completely animal condition; but he has, on the other hand, never escaped from it.

Talk of world peace is heard today only among the white peoples, and not among the much more numerous coloured races. This is a perilous state of affairs. When individual thinkers and idealists talk of peace, as they have done since time immemorial, the effect is negligible. But when whole peoples become pacifistic it is a symptom of senility. Strong and unspent races are not pacifistic. To adopt such a position is to abandon the future, for the pacifist ideal is a terminal condition that is contrary to the basic facts of existence. As long as man continues to evolve, there will be wars.

One must be a fox to recognize traps and a lion to frighten wolves

Freedom for the wolves has often meant death to the sheep.