Ralph Fiennes quotes:

There is a tension in relationships between wanting to return to the womb, but also wanting to be free. Because sometimes the woman's attentions can be overly maternal, and you want to go, 'Ahhhh!'

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.

I admire the world of the books and the characters that she's created, but I'm not an addict of Harry Potter. I don't feel possessive about it.

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

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.

Within the process of filming, unexpected situations occur.

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.

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

Little moments can have a feeling and a texture that is very real.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

I have grown up loving Shakespeare.

In the studio system, things are expected of a film. By the first, second, third act, there's a generic language that comes out of the more commercial system.

We'd all like to believe that perhaps people could stop killing each other.

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

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

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.

It was just two energies between two people, you can't prescribe that.

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.

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

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

I felt it [Shakespeare's Coriolanus] is sort of an examination of our dysfunction as a nationalistic, tribal entities. I think the world is rocking and cracking open in weird and worrying places. And I think Coriolanus, the play, reflected that.

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.

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

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

It's great to be on a set where there's time and there's focus and there's also a kind of adrenaline thrill on a set where people are saying: "We have to get this shot, we've have to go, we've got to move on!"

I think I feel more like you're an actor for hire and you take the jobs you want to take, obviously, and some pay well and some don't pay well at all but you go on a gut feeling and it's all a big adventure.

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

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

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.

...the world is a giant community now. This excuse of distance, time, doesn't work...We're all so connected. We can't spend every second of our lives worrying about another family miles away but we somehow have to factor it in where we can.

You have to just dive over the edge. You haven't got time to mess about.

Education, awareness and prevention are the key, but stigmatisation and exclusion from family is what makes people suffer most

Ridicule is also a weapon against forces of evil. Really clever, intelligent ridicule.

Success is all about being able to extend love to people. The people I consider successful are so because of how they handle their responsibilities to other people, how they approach the future, people who have a full sense of the value of their life and what they want to do with it.

So much of movie acting is in the lighting. And in loving your characters. I try to know them, and with that intimacy comes love. And now, I love Voldemort.

There's a lot of people who feel there's a tabloid journalist who had it coming.

I tried to play rugby but was never very good.

I certainly gained a lot by reading about Shanghai.

I spent the past week here in India getting a sense of the reality of HIV and AIDS in people's lives. Fathers and mothers are dying, leaving children with no support. Stigma and discrimination is ruining the family lives. There is an urgent need for education, information, and increased awareness of HIV and AIDS. The response needs to be now. We cannot afford to become fatigued.

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.

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.

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

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

I'm sure acting is a deeply neurotic thing to do.

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

I've never felt fallow in the sense that there's been no work.

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 have a lot of stuff I want to talk about and offer up. It would be odd not to have ideas about something.

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

I have no regrets.

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.

Awards are like applause, and every actor likes to hear applause.

Having gone through editing process, I can see that in actor's faces there's point where they're not managing their performance and that's, I think, the best place to be. You've done the homework, you've learned the lines, at that point you just sort of let it out.

I don't feel I'm playing villains all the time.

I feel there's so much still to learn about acting. But there is some magic in the capturing of performance and in the process of editing a performance. The psychology of human beings and what's coming through the face... that fascinates me.

I have a great editor and I enjoy, in a masochistic way, being ruthless about my own performance. There's an initial point in the editing, if you're directing yourself, especially in my case, where you go, "Ouch, ouch, ouch, I can't watch this." And then, there's a point where you become hard-nosed and just take your neurosis away and go, "What's working? That's okay. That's okay. We can lose that, and lose that." You get objective about it.

I learned a lot about acting - watching not just myself but other actors and learning how to distinguish between two great takes. It's also about one's own taste in performance.

I loved doing Harry Potter. I had a great time on that. And I think it's good to have a mix. I think you're learning all the time.

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

I should say, a piece of advice that was given to me very early on by the principle of RADA (Royal Academy of Dramatic Art) which is where I went. When he auditioned me, he said, "Your speech, monologue, is fine. It's good. Yeah, I think you have ability but you're making it happen. Don't make it happen, let it happen." And that's a sort of subtle shift I think, as an actor.

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

I was only interested in my scene, and I had to go through thousands and thousands of other scenes. I got my scene and I read it many, many, many, many, many times. That was my research.

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

I'm interested in the spirits of people. In the theatre, there's the acting part of acting - and I'm not saying that can't be great - and there's the essence. To explore that essence, you need a key, a look, a gesture, an insight that unlocks the person's soul.

I'm more relaxed about how the editing process will create a performance and that, in a way, gives me a sense of freedom.

In Shakespeare, keep it simple. Don't over-inflect. The speech needs to be naturalistic and simple and accessible as much as possible.

It [the scene] can be something given to you and you go, "Ah this is a good idea, I can work with this." Sometimes it cuts right across your instinct and that's when I might resist. Even if the director might be insistent, I think it's very important to say, "Look, I'm not feeling this. I'll try to make it work but I got to let you know."

It's not great if someone gives you sort of bland praise without giving you clear direction and say, "This is good, let's try it like this." I have worked with someone who seemed quite inarticulate and just would say, "That's good, that's good." That's very frustrating because - it's nice to know something is good but you know it can always change.

It's thrilling to have the opportunity to work in different areas, whether it's on a project that has all the resources behind it like Harry Potter or James Bond and then to go somewhere there's very few resources.

Kenya doesn't have much of an infrastructure for hosting a film of this scale. Our producer decided that for the film to really work it had to be in Kenya.

Like anything to do with trust, in any relationship it emerges and just the chemistry, vibe between two people [an actor and a director]. You just know whether this is someone I like to be with whose interaction with me I believe in.

News reports can overwhelm us. We can be appalled, we can sympathise. But what is hard to grasp is the sense that, at this moment, people are working, organising - not just at an executive level, but on the floor, in the warehouse. A man is packing a box of oral rehydration tablets; maternity kits are being prepared; education kits are being packed. And somewhere, tomorrow, those boxes will be unpacked and a child with life-threatening diarrhoea will be saved, a baby will be born in more hygienic circumstances, a girl will receive her first exercise book and her first pencil.

News reports can overwhelm us. We can be appalled, we can sympathise. But what is hard to grasp is the sense that, at this moment, people are working, organising...

People fear they won't get what they want.

Performance is made in the editing room, and I've come to see the truth in that - the idea that they say performances are usually made in the editing room because what you film is the raw material. I think just going through the process of saying, "Which take do we use? Why is that the take we want? I want that take can you edit again, I'm not sure that's the one, I think it's this one." And just because you go through that process, I think somehow it's made me sort of more open about the [actor's] possibilities.

Success...Is all about being able to extend love to people...not in a big capital-letter sense but in the everyday; little by little, task by task, gesture by gesture, word by word

The actor shouldn't edit themselves or be anxious. And the actors that I admire are always the ones who are inventive and their imaginative life in free-willing. It's a director's job to go, "No here, don't do that, go there."

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

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

There are those moments when you shake someone's hand, have a conversation with someone, and suddenly your all bound together because you share your humanity in one simple moment.

Unicef wants to encourage a sense of stability for a child.

Unicef's education initiative does not seek to impose, but to initiate and integrate. It does, however, aim to address the huge bias towards education for boys at the expense of girls in so many cultures.

Voldemort? That might be real.

We are now living in a jungle where the strong eats the weak,we are not better than the Arabs to despise them.

We're in a world of truncated sentences, soundbites and Twitter... [Language] is being eroded -- it's changing. Our expressiveness and our ease with some words is being diluted so that the sentence with more than one clause is a problem for us, and the word of more than two syllables is a problem for us.

What moves me in art is how we question who we are as people.

When you get into the edit you'll understand what making a film is. You'll see all the things you missed and all the possibilities you have from what you shot.

When you meet women, don't pretend to be anything that you're not.

You dread that there will be real problems during filming.