Quotes By Damian Lewis

Dramatically it's always more interesting to conceal rather than reveal things.

You have to go where the good writing is.

There are ways of avoiding becoming tabloid fodder and therefore giving people license to pry into your private life. And there's a distinction between being an actor and being a celebrity. You may become a celebrity through acting, but you don't need to do so.

I'd feel guilty just doing gags.

It's certainly true that I was brought up in that British amateur tradition, the one which always held that if you were reasonably good at cricket, knew one or two Latin texts and a few zingy Oscar Wilde quotes for dinner parties, you were pretty much ready to go and run some outpost in Hindustan.

I want to make a clear distinction between people who take acting seriously and people who call themselves actors because they've been on reality TV or something.

You just have to take control of your own performance.

I think you can't be really posh and be an interesting actor. I'm a bit of a posh rough.

Quiet people, people who aren't given to emotional outbursts, people who are economic with words - they're also fun to play, but you find yourself needing a laser precision in those roles. Otherwise you just sort of stand around, looking slightly brain-dead. You worry about being uninteresting.

I've always been a narcissist.

You can't do something that is morally vacuous or dysfunctional and then write it off saying, 'It wasn't my film, I was just doing a job in it.'

A cricket ball broke my nose when I was a kid so I couldn't breath through it. Before I had it operated on I used to stand on stage with my mouth slightly open.

I'm one of those pesky Brits.

My heroes were all in the theatre.

I think people like to be scared. I think people like tension and suspense in a movie.

For me the rehearsal period is the part I most enjoy. It's the creating of the story.

You know, I think I am faintly spiritual.

No Western government has ever played the long-term in terms of foreign policy.

People need revelation, and then they need resolution.

In England we burnt redheads at the stake, because we thought they were witches. There are still young redheads in Britain getting ripped for having red hair. 'Oy, Ginger!'

I'm very lucky.

In the end, there's something of the puritan work ethic about me that roles really must sustain me on an intellectual level.

If you think you don't want to play another psychopath, but the script is amazing, and the director is fantastic, and the story is incredible, then you may end up playing your third psychopath in a row.

The best shows succeed because they tap into a national conversation.

I'm sponsored by Audi, so I have this rather lovely rather arrangement where they just insist that I'm always in the latest model.

You can't be sent away to prison for life and feel OK about it.

I'm not an American, but I have this weird connection to America in different ways through my dad living here for five years, my godfather being an American who I'm very close to.

I've discovered just how symbiotic the relationship is between writers, directors and actors. They ask the same questions and strip down texts in exactly the same way.

Producing is a world of compromise and actors are utterly spoiled all the time.

I'm no more or less antisocial than the next person.