Michael Fassbender quotes:

I just went off for two months traveling around Europe on a motorcycle and pretty much turned my phone off. I did 5,000 miles with my dad. We went through Holland, Germany, Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro, Italy... and then I did Spain and France by myself.

You use words like 'introvert' and 'extrovert,' various traits of a personality. A lot of that stuff, we used in drama school, and that was kind of interesting, to realize my teachers sort of ripped off a lot of Jung. And how much of it is part of our society now, these phrases, introvert and extrovert, where it actually came from.

As an audience member, those studio films are fun. I like an adventure tale, and I also like to go see something that has more of a social pulse. I like to keep learning and trying new things. And if the scripts are good, it doesn't really matter.

We feel a lot of pressure about looking silly or appearing weak, whatever that means, or being a failure. You have to keep in your head: what's the worst that can happen?

I keep everything very simple. I like telling stories.

What I find really interesting is to try and mix it up, to push myself and try different things. I don't want to stay in my comfort zone. I want to take risks and keep myself scared.

I'm always interested in trying to investigate different personalities. I want to keep myself guessing and keep the fear element alive, so that I don't get too comfortable.

Magneto has a whole lot of complexity to him. Emotionally, he's coming from a very damaged place. I like the ambivalence of it. I want the audience leaving the theater wondering, asking the questions themselves rather than being spoon-fed like a lot of these super-villain characters.

There's so much going on in the world. There's so much information being thrown at us - so many things are being sold to us, and we're being told how we should appear and how to be more successful, blah, blah, blah. How does that manifest itself? In the pressures, the stress, this need to escape.

I guess in the independent market, I'd be getting offers, but in terms of big studio films, I still have to audition. I don't think my name is that well-known, I don't have much of a following to guarantee box office success yet.

If there's friends around, I'll cook. Or if I have a girlfriend. But on my own I kind of fell out of the habit of it, and it's a shame really because I know it's good for me. It's something quite therapeutic.

Why does a three-year-old, and it's usually boys, want to drive the tractor or have machinery and be in control of it? I don't know. Why wouldn't you ask to boil a kettle or something? Maybe you would, I dunno.

Nobody wants to hear Metallica at lunchtime.

There's no point in swanning through and being cool as a breeze in every scene. It's not really that interesting. Even if you're a superhero.

It's more interesting isn't it, if I've got a hedonistic dark side?

Scratch the surface of what's socially normal. I suppose in some way all of us have something we display to the public and things we feel too ashamed of or uncomfortable with to reveal to other people.

There's no point thinking, 'Well, my life's certainly worked out, I've got all the answers.' It would be wrong for me to say that I don't get seduced by certain things. That things don't become tempting.

We did a lot of that in drama school: intellectualising and maybe justifying your position. 'I am a thinking actor and I have thought this through' - well, just do it. I much prefer the doing aspect.

You know, it's amazing. I don't even have a car, would you believe it? I had a motorbike and it got stolen last year. So I've got to buy another one of those, I suppose. I can treat myself to that.

Being movie director you've got the art department, you've got the actors, you've got the camera department, you've got make-up and hair, and props. You've got your finger in all these pies, and you're making sure that everything cooks at the right temperature.

People are complicated. Our behavior towards one another is strange. So I like opportunities to investigate that.

Why not provoke some thought and get people talking about things? I like characters that are flawed because we all are. When people break up in a script, you think, Oh, right, there must be tears shed here. But maybe the fact of the matter is that they're both laughing.

I came to Los Angeles and did auditions for television. I made a terrible mess of most of them and I was quite intimidated. I felt very embarrassed and went back to London. I got British television jobs intermittently between the ages of 23 and 27, but it was very patchy.

I suppose the doctor-patient relationship has that idea of transference. I think it's a special thing that doctors have. We all find doctors sexy. That's why there are so many TV shows about doctors.

I don't think peroxide-blond hair is a beneficial look for me.

I think that idea of alienation, for whatever reason, is still very prevalent within our society and a lot of people deal with it - most people deal with it at some point in their life unless they're sort of the golden child. I think that's something that we all need to address.

I've always been more inclined to go out to work than carry on with academic studies.

"X-Men" is not really about mutants; it's about humanity. I think it's about the human race. We're an absolutely destructive race. It seems that we can't seem to get beyond this level of tribalism that has been around for thousands of years. Anything we fear we tend to destroy.

[As an actor] I have ideas, but things should always be fluid. You should always be ready to follow an instinct. Something might reveal itself on the day.

Any good kitchen should be stocked up in oysters, shouldn't they?

As an actor, it's always been good to be working at all.

As an audience member and as an actor I much prefer to find ambiguity.

At one point you think, well, it's funny, I could just be a starving actor. So if somebody were to pull the plug, there'd be no room for complaint.

Big things have small beginnings.

'Cause I do so much homework I'm good to go on the first take; I don't want to rehearse. I like the element of what's unpredictable of that first take and nobody knows what's going to happen, and I'm a big fan of that.

Even if I'm playing a superhero, it has to be steeped in reality.

Everyone's crazy anyway. And those who think they aren't, are the ones who are even crazier - because they're in denial.

Everything I put my name to and take part in, I want to be good. That's not saying it will always happen. But I want to make bold choices.

For me, addiction comes down to basically where a pattern of behaviour has developed and that pattern of behaviour is becoming a very damaging cycle. It's sort of damaging your relationships, friends or lovers, it's damaging your own personal health and it's damaging for you and your workplace.

'Hunger' definitely changed my life, in terms of being recognized by filmmakers, since that was very much a filmmakers' film.

I always approach film as a fan.

I believe that if you go and see a film you should have to sort of invest something yourself and you have to do a little bit of the work as an audience member, so when you leave the cinema you should be having those conversations either with yourself - if you're crazy like me- or with friends afterwards.

I could never swim in the ocean after seeing Jaws.

I definitely think the first works best.

I don't know what's going to happen. I'm flavor of the month at the moment, but somebody else is going to roll around the corner in three months' time. I just want to keep working. I can't stop!

I don't like to plan anything ever because it never seems to work. I'm just really...let's just get this film out and see how this one does.

I love to go into a movie and have no idea what's going to happen in it.

I might have been curious about actors' lives when I was growing up. That's human nature.

I quite enjoy the lines on my forehead because they show my life. That's my history and I like to see that in other people. Like this wrinkle is due to some girl who broke my heart. I don't want to escape it in any way.

I remember hearing that the spirit was always next to you, so I would always make room in my bed for the spirit ... I'd make room for the teddy bears, Jesus and me. And then I'd wake up in the morning, and I'd squashed 'em all.

I take my work seriously but I can't take myself too seriously. I'm in such a crazy privileged position.

I think the fact that us as a race still continues to be very tribal and we haven't really moved away from that over hundreds and hundreds of years of experience...

I try my best to find variety in what I'm doing, but there's a lot out there that's the same.

I'm aware of my weaknesses and THE BEAST WITHIN.

If you're addicted to gambling, you know where to go to gamble. So, if you have a condition where you're addicted to sex, you know where other that are looking for the same thing are going.

If you're dealing with a character that actually exists, there's an awful lot of information there. So, you can put together, from the information, motivations, insecurities, reactions. Where does that seed get born, if you like? What I do is put that together.

If you're dealing with heavy topic matter, sometimes it's good to have a lightness going into it because it allows you to be open to possibilities, rather than getting rigidly stuck into a certain mind-set. People are strange. When you break up, sometimes you end up laughing with one another, as opposed to crying. Things in life are unusual, and to find those things, it's best to be relaxed.

I'm fairly competitive.

I'm not going to talk about my private life with a total stranger, unless I feel like I need to. Why would I? I don't.

It's a difficult thing as an actor not to repeat one's self.

It's such a terrifying thing when mobs of people get together and persecute foreigners.

It's the worst thing if you're sitting there in the theater, going, "Oh, that's the guy who dates this person and likes to do this in the morning and that in the afternoon." Then you're just watching a brand, as opposed to an actor.

My goal was for acting to become my main income. I would say to myself, 'I'm good enough'. That became my mantra.

Nowadays, especially in big commercial films it's much easier for the audience, and they tend to get spoonfed. It's much more interesting to me, people leave the theater and they start asking themselves questions and find their own moral compass about what these characters have been doing.

Some actors might just do one thing, and another actor does another thing. I do an awful lot of preparation with the script, really. What I do is repeat the script, over and over and over again. Through that, it's almost like it seeps into my enamel. I'm reading all the characters, as well as my own. That is where the bulk of my preparation goes into.

Sometimes if I stick in a character too much I feel like I might start to get blinkered, because I'm making my decisions too definite.

The actors I looked up to when I was a teenager, they all just disappeared into different characters.

The arts are very alive in Ireland, so that had its influence on me. But I consider myself European, really.

Trying to identify and understand, as opposed to judging, is very important for me, in approaching characters.

We moved to Ireland when I was two and we settled in Killarney, Co Kerry. Where we were living in Germany is very industrial and very grey and my parents wanted to have countryside around for my sister and I to grow up in.

We're all curious about a lot of things.

When I go the cinema, unfortunately nowadays, especially with the big commercial films, the audience is spoon-fed through the entire experience and they don't have to do any work.

When I was four, I just wanted to drive, I collected toy cars. Where does that sort of thing come from? In hindsight you go, 'Oh, liked it because of this.' Maybe it's just the wheel.

You know, when you finish the day, and you finish the scene, you don't get a chance to go back to it. So you wanna make sure that everything is left on the floor.

You want society to accept you; but you can't even accept yourself.

If I'm playing a murderer, I don't go out and start murdering people.