Quotes By Ralph Fiennes

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.

If I had a gun to my head and I had to choose between theater and film I'd choose theater.

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

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.

One of the things that binds us as a family is a shared sense of humor.

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

There's a challenge to playing these fantasy figures because they are fantasy figures. You have to enter into this sort of imaginative world of the writer.

When I first filmed things, they were always slightly awkward.

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

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

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.

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

He's really sort of the devil. He's completely emotionally detached. He has no empathy. You find that in psychopaths. It's about power with Voldemort. It's an aphrodisiac for him. Power makes him feel alive.

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

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.

You feel yourself working to show something. I've learned to distrust that feeling.

Within the process of filming, unexpected situations occur.

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.

Being an actor means asking people to look at you. I guess I accept that. But it's a profession in which the job is to show another world and other people. You may access it through bits of yourself, and your imagination and experience, but actually, in the end, you're not playing yourself.

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

I got to read some writings by serial killers, and they got inside my head. They were quite disturbing. I read disturbing stuff about that very detached way of manipulating people to do things.

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

The sets were fantastic. The Harry Potter sets are brilliant. You do get transported for a second.

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