Quotes By Ralph Fiennes

I couldn't get as big as a bodybuilder. I tried to put on as much weight in the right places as I could. My weightlifting was impressive for me, but not for some of the guys I see down at the gym.

I have grown up loving Shakespeare.

I don't plan a career. That doesn't work for me. I just have to go with my gut.

God is not anything human. God is a force, God is chaos, God is unknown. God is terror and enlightenment at the same time.

I guess I'd love to be surprised by something I had never thought of.

Going to the movies was a big event in my youth. My father would be the initiator - he'd have me put on a jacket to see a film.

And although I've been very fortunate in the film work that's come my way, I need to get back to the stage. If I'm away for a maximum of two years, I feel something's wrong.

Gardeners are good at nurturing, and they have a great quality of patience, they're tender. They have to be persistent.

In the best material, you always should be able to somehow make a case for a story to be transposed to any other time.

I went out to Mount Kilimanjaro, which I thought was very beautiful, but there were a lot of people there.

As an actor, there's a bit of you that's decided you want to be looked at and watched, but there's a paradoxical bit that wants to run away.

The film depends on the audience's belief in this relationship.

There is a humanitarian impulse that one aspires to and there are days when one doesn't do it very well.

I'm not very good at being domesticated. I've tried. The domestic life I find claustrophobic - the rituals and habits and patterns.

I never studied anything about film technique in school. Eventually, I realized that cinema and theater are not so different: from the gut to the heart to the head of a character is the same journey for both.

When theater becomes a soothing middle-class thing, when it's packaged as the Night Out, then that's the death of it.

I think Shakespeare is like a dialect. If I heard a broad Scots accent, I'd probably struggle at first but then I'd start to look for words I recognise and I'd get the gist. I think Shakespeare is like that.

I like to keep fit, but I never lift very heavy weights.

I certainly gained a lot by reading about Shanghai.

You're meant to be playing the distillation of evil, which can be anything.

Actors use who they are to be someone else, but I would hate to ever think I'm playing myself. It's imagining being someone else that is the key motivating thing for me. So when people want to know about me, it makes me a bit unnerved.

I can't go and shoot people in the back of the head because It's a kids' movie, which is actually quite a good test because you haven't got the overt threat of a knife in the face.

I don't feel particularly comfortable about actors using whatever power they may have to push their beliefs, unless they're extremely well informed.

The tensions between authority and the people need to be heard, especially when they are suffering and they can't eat.

When she was younger, my mother was quite committed to Roman Catholicism. But she got disillusioned with it and moved closer to something like Buddhist beliefs near the end of her life.

Most films are rooted in a book or a comic strip, but I don't go out there saying I want to do adaptations.

I veer away from trying to understand why I act. I just know I need to do it.

I was grateful to have two weeks to shoot this one scene in Harry Potter. It's a big, big scene, but they have to deliver. And they have high expectations.

I respond to a part just intuitively when I read a script.

Kenya doesn't have much of an infrastructure for hosting a film.