Jeremy Irons Quotes

I was the youngest. The yule lamb. The one who always got away without doing the washing up. My sister was four years older, and my brother six years.

We all have our time machines. Some take us back, they're called memories. Some take us forward, they're called dreams.

It's just money; it's made up. Pieces of paper with pictures on it so we don't have to kill each other just to get something to eat.

An acting assistant stage manager in a theater in Canterbury, a rep theater.

A small wage but just enough to get by on, and I made props, and I walked on, and I changed scenery, and I realized that I just loved it.

When it seems that someone has shattered your dreams.

...pick up even the smallest of pieces and use them to build bigger and better dreams.

Most people are robust. If a man puts his hand on a woman’s bottom, any woman worth her salt can deal with it. It is communication. Can’t we be friendly?

I think I would not be described as a character actor in that I don't take on characteristics which are very alien to me.

I get bored very easily, so I love doing different things, changing, doing a job for a month and then doing another one for six months and then moving into a different group of people. I love being able to stop. That's one of the greatest benefits we have in our profession.

I love being part of a group who tells stories, whether it be in the theater or in cinema, and I love creating imaginary worlds rather as children do, but I never had a burning desire to act, but it just sort of suited me.

A trip to the mainland was a big event and happened maybe once a year, although now you can get across in a speed boat in seven minutes but then it was a long way away.

Now in my theater training I showed no aptitude at all.

And whenever I'm in a situation where I'm wearing the same as 600 other people and doing the same thing as 600 other people, looking back, I always found ways to make myself different, whether it be having a red lining inside of my jacket, having red shoes, it hasn't changed.

I succeeded on sort of chutzpah and charm.

No technique at all, didn't know what I was doing, but it worked and the character suited me.

Anywhere I can ski in the morning and sell a movie in the afternoon is good.

Making movies can actually be quite boring, there's a lot of sitting around and waiting. Unless you really believe in the story and love the character, and unless you really need the money, I don't see the point in doing it.

I had done a fair bit of traveling during the holidays in my school days with my guitar and discovered that I could live on it. Admittedly, I traveled with a sleeping bag but I could always find somewhere to lay my head.

I was educated in a private school in England amongst people who had been trained for sort of banking or the Army or business. As I came towards the end of my education, I thought I must find something or I'll never meet any of these people again.

One always returns to the fact that there are just too many of us, the population continues to rise and it's unsustainable.

I'm very glad I'm not a politician. I think it's one step away from the gates of hell, being a politician. I really do. It`s a nightmare.

Sadly, one's parameters are constantly narrowed by one's success.

I think I'm probably an assassin and not a Templar, but no doubt we're probably run by people with Templar mentalities.

I envy children who know that they're going to become doctors, know they're going to go into the forces or whatever. I think choice is one of the hardest things, but that's what I try to give my children, to say you can do anything.

Same-sex marriage will lead to "fathers marrying sons."

I constantly experience failure in that my work is never as good as I want it to be. So I live with failure.

I've never been passionate about acting, and I find more and more that I work to live the life I want to live. [...] There's something about the detachment I have, the feeling of the lack of importance about what I do, that is healthy.

Paris Hilton, that's very interesting what she did.

I've never done that. I haven't really sort of ever got into that. As time passes, maybe I should record it and put it in a vault so that when I get a little old don't have the energy I can remember how life used to be.

I'm a complete libertarian. I think it's very, very dangerous. I really mean that. I think the smoking ban is a tip of an iceberg of society - the leaders of society telling us how to be. I think it's not their business. It's an attitude where the governors think, 'We know what's best for people, and they're so stupid that they would only not do it if we ban it.'

The sad thing about any business I suppose, but in mine you see it particularly, is that you’re always asked to do what you’ve already done.

I try to avoid doing movies where I act with tennis balls. It's ultimately incredibly tedious.

So nevertheless, what I'm saying is that what one is - one's parameters are constantly narrowed by one's success, and my desire is to widen my field even if I risk failure.

I have to say that I've reached the state of my career where I quite like not to work. Strange enough, I'm busier than ever. I'm not spending every waking hour beside a telephone waiting for it to ring.

I was not naturally intellectual, but somebody whose interest had to be whetted, still the case sadly.

What I try to do as an actor is constantly find that, find ways to risk, find opportunities to fall on my face if it's going to be worth it, and then maybe I'll surprise myself.

Could a father not marry his son?

Godspell was a good leap for me, it was a good shop window.

I've actually always been fussy about the work I do.

It's always useful to be in big movies for one's career.

Actors often behave like children, and so we're taken for children. I want to be grown up.

It's always great to play a man who sets himself up to be punctured.

You think, you don't just speak. The lines come off the thoughts.

What takes us back to the past are the memories. What brings us forward is our dreams.

Mine is an actor's voice, not a singer's voice, but the part was written for an actor (Richard Burton), not a singer.

And trust, yes, which is important, but that is what I aim towards. Now that is difficult for some people, and with that desire to get things as good as possible, I would say that I’m probably regarded as quite prickly to work with.

Because I'm now successful, what I'm being offered as an actor is more and more of the same.

There are a group of people who are managing the world to their advantage and who just look to the rest of us as people who will buy their products and fund their salaries.

My father was a CPA. He worked hard in the aircraft industry, and would come home more and more infrequently. He was about to leave my mother, which he did when I was 15.

I certainly play people on the edge quite a lot. I am interested in what makes people odd and what makes them different. In life I try to play the edges. I have a horror of the herd. There are many, many different sorts of people. A lot of people are fairly uninteresting. I want to play the interesting ones. The villains are always more interesting to portray. Shakespeare knew that.

Never played a video game. Actually, I try to keep them out of my house.

I liked the theater. I liked the people. I liked the time that we worked.