Jeremy Irons's Quotes

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.

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.

So I continued through my next school, which takes me up to the age of 17, moving from the bottom stream of one year into the bottom stream of the next year, all the way through. I showed other talents which gave me self-respect, which is fine.

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.

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.

No, I don't believe in hard work. If something is hard, leave it. Let it come to you. Let it happen.

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

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

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 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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

My next step must be to go to drama school. Well, I get into drama school, so I did that.

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

So the better my partner or my opposition, however you like to think about it, the better my game.

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.

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.