I made the film in spite of Harvey, not because of Harvey.

I love to sit and watch people. I love to sit and listen to people.

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’ve been very lucky.

I didn’t like the idea of being foolish, but I learned pretty soon that it was essential to fail and be foolish.

Being at the centre of a film is a burden one takes on with innocence the first time. Thereafter, you take it on with trepidation.

It is awesome to feel you are carrying on the family name.

If you have a certain wildness of spirit, a cabinet maker’s workshop is not the place to express it.

I hate the domestic life.

I feel less often compelled to do the work than I was in the past.

At a certain age it just became apparent to me that this was probably the work that I would have to do.

The last time I was on a small set would’ve been probably My Left Foot.

I’ve got a serious-looking head.

I like things that make you grit your teeth. I like tucking my chin in and sort of leading into the storm. I like that feeling. I like it a lot.

Ireland was a place for the renewal of hope and I still see it like that.

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.

Everybody has to know for themselves what they’re capable of.

I love what I do.

I find it difficult to be in rooms now for long periods of time. I can usually take it for about an hour. Then I stride out.

I live in a landscape, which every single day of my life is enriching.

I still relate to my father very much. I mean, I talk to him in a certain way, as we do talk to the dead.

Very often there’s this misapprehension about actors being people that need to display themselves, to reveal themselves in public.

It must be hard interviewing actors.

When I was younger, I made some decisions that I shouldn’t have. And, in hindsight, I’ve almost always been wrong when I haven’t listened to myself.

Actors should never give interviews.

I just knew at an early time in my life how important privacy was.

For about a year, I just didn’t know what to do. I did laboring jobs, working in the docks, construction sites.

I find it easier to work when it’s quiet.

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.

I would wish for any one of my colleagues to have the experience of working with Martin Scorsese once in their lifetime.

We all live under some repression; we have to, it’s part of the deal.

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

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.

I hate wasting people’s time.

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.

Germans don’t speak in a German accent, they just speak German.

I’m not sure you learn anything on film sets.

I like to cook things very slowly.

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.

When I did make the decision to focus on acting, I think my mother was just relieved for me that I had finally started to focus.

Well, we all have murderous thoughts throughout the day, if not the week.

Many years ago, I really didn’t know where the next work was coming from.

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

I’d always felt very strongly in the power of vocation.

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

I depleted myself to the point where I had nothing left.

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.

I like to learn about things.

My main memories of my father are of his illness.

You can never fully put your finger on the reason why you’re suddenly, inexplicably compelled to explore one life as opposed to another.