Daniel Day-Lewis Quotes

I don't think musicals are my thing. I'm not a big fan. Definitely have to get on the stage and do something like a straight play.

I started off in theater; I did exclusively theater for four or five years. In the last few years, television has come along but I can still make film. I feel very privileged that I can move between them.

I think acting came later in life when I went to college. I started out there. I wasn't a big star in the school plays or anything. I guess I just really liked stories. I was an English-literature major, and that's all about stories and narratives. Film and theater are very powerful storytelling mediums. You sit in a dark room and enter another world. I love that as a member of the audience, and I sort of wanted to get on the other side.

I consider theater, this is a vacation for me from LA, I sort of view this as I get to have this vacation and during my vacation I get to work on acting. It's like an acting class. And if I go too long without doing a play, I just feel empty. Like approaching a role, I feel like the pool is very shallow, like I'm drawn from it. So I need to come back and do a play, fortunately I've been able to, every couple of years.

Theater is a recreation. It can be much more, but unless it's recreation, I don't see the point of it.

There's nothing like theater. It's really amazing. But it does take up all of your time. I would like to get into more film, just because I find it super fascinating.

Theater will never, and never has, gotten audiences like film. But theater goes to work on society in a different and more subversive way.

I'm very much interested in doing actual theater.

Doing theater is like walking a tightrope without a net.

I grew up with it. As a young actor, I was always aware of the brilliant work of Shakespeare. We studied Romeo & Juliet and Macbeth in school. As a young actor, you're always mystified and intrigued by such brilliant work. To actually have the chance to be involved in this production was a wonderful thing for me.

Acting is divine dissatisfaction. It's the greatest thing in the world to do, but you are never satisfied with it ever.

I grew up going to the theater. That was one of the nice things my mom did was she took us to plays and symphony concerts and to the museums. Theater captured my imagination. I just loved the idea of that box, which is essentially what a stage is from a certain distance, a box with all this life going on in it. So, I was eleven when I wrote my first play. Of course, it was horrible.

Performing in a live theater is absolutely unbeatable. It is something I have done my entire life and have a gift, it seems, for sharing thoughts live.

I'm really enjoying being an actor right now, at this point in my life. It's a great job, it's a huge responsibility, and I just want to do it more.

If I had to pick one form of acting, it would be live theater. That's where I started; that's where I became a man, I think I'm still finishing up that job.

The true theater, because it moves and makes use of living instruments, continues to stir up shadows where life has never ceased to grope its way.

I think the great thing about theatre, and if you start in theatre, is that it does build a confidence in poetic themes and ideas.

You know, you should start to be in plays and things like that. Write some scripts. If you're an artist and you truly don't believe what you're spittin' then you need to really seriously be an actor then.

Theatre takes place all the time - wherever one is - and art simply facilitates persuading one this is the case.

You can read a Shakespeare play, but does that mean you wouldn't want to see it on the stage?

Film is very much about capturing the essence of things - if you feel it, and you've got the right person shooting it, it'll come across. Theater's a different animal; it's physically different and requires a different discipline. In the theater, you're mining the same material, constantly honing the same thing, executing it and keeping it alive and fresh.

I really think that people who want to think more serious have to go and watch theater. Theater is a very sterilized art form. Not as much as music, but very close to music.

I really wanted to go back to the theater, the live theater. That was the thing I had never had a chance to do, even though I had trained to be a stage actress.

I would love to work on Broadway, but I don't know that it would manifest itself in musical theater.... I have terrible stage fright that I'd have to get over.

When you are in a good theatre show, it is a wonderful and very fulfilling experience, entertaining a large audience and their showing their appreciation for your efforts.