I can't honestly account for the very personal response that I have to one story and not another, a sense of an orbit, the orbit of a world that draws me as my own life recedes.
Daniel Day-LewisRead
I suppose it's a very highly developed form of denial, but some part of me completely denies that I'm a performer.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects an inner conflict regarding self-identity and the nature of performance in art.
Daniel Day-Lewis expresses a profound contemplation on his identity as a performer, suggesting that despite his accomplishments in acting, he feels an inherent denial of that label. This reflects a common struggle among artists who grapple with the authenticity of their craft and how it relates to their true selves, highlighting a deeper philosophical inquiry into the nature of self-perception and role-playing.
Themes
IdentityPerformanceArtSelf-DenialPhilosophy
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about the nature of fame, this quote serves to remind us that public personas may not reflect personal truths.
More from Daniel Day-Lewis
All quotes βOne 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.
Daniel Day-LewisRead
You don't merely give over your creativity to making a film - you give over your life! In theatre, by contrast, you live these two rather strange lives simultaneously; you have no option but to confront the mould on last night's washing-up.
Daniel Day-LewisRead
When I've gone back to work, it's always with that sense of inevitability. That may be a complete delusion, but it's the one that I need to get out of bed and go about my business. That sense that I can't avoid this thing. I better just get on with it.
Daniel Day-LewisRead
I don't torture myself. And I do the work because of the pleasure involved. I'm satisfying a compulsion I find nigh-on irresistible. It's not necessarily because of the work itself. I just feel the need for a period of regeneration afterwards. Like leaving a field fallow when you've grazed too much on it. I feel depleted.
Daniel Day-LewisRead
England is obsessed with where you came from, and they are determined to keep you in that place, be it in a drawing room or in the gutter.
Daniel Day-LewisRead
Similar quotes
She stops, pauses, turns to the left to glance at some possible threat or irregularity, and then continues to the north. This motion, so intensely human, transcends time.
Mary LeakeyRead
Death focuses the mind on the things that really matter: why are we here, and what should we do?
Arthur C. ClarkeRead
Does history repeat itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce? No, that's too grand, too considered a process. History just burps, and we taste again that raw-onion sandwich it swallowed centuries ago.
Julian BarnesRead
[F]or the most part football these days is the opium of the people, not to speak of their crack cocaine. Its icon is the impeccably Tory, slavishly conformist Beckham. The Reds are no longer the Bolsheviks. Nobody serious about political change can shirk the fact that the game has to be abolished. And any political outfit that tried it on would have about as much chance of power as the chief executive of BP has in taking over from Oprah Winfrey.
Terry EagletonRead
As to the fable that there are Antipodes, that is to say, men on the opposite side of the earth where the sun rises when it sets to us, men who walk with their feet opposite ours, that is on no ground credible. Even if some unknown landmass is there, and not just ocean, there was only one pair of original ancestors, and it is inconceivable that such distant regions should have been peopled by Adam's descendants.
Saint AugustineRead
I have seen (as far as it can be seen) many persons changed in a moment from the spirit of horror, fear, and despair to the spirit of hope, joy, peace; and from sinful desires, till then reigning over them, to a pure desire of doing the will of God.
John WesleyRead