Stephen Rea quotes:

People ask me to smile for the camera, but somehow it always comes out gloomy.

I'd like to own a movie camera - a proper one, with film, not a digital thing. Celluloid has more character.

Angel was the first Irish feature film. Neil's first movie and my first movie.

The Butcher Boy is a very great novel indeed and a very important Irish novel. The ambiguity of that is, he's writing a book about an appalling situation and he does it in a hilarious way.

At this moment, when Ireland seems about to break into something new, we thought it was worth looking back at a time when people seemed to have found a way out of the sectarian division of the country.

I don't know that I'm 'hangdog'. That suggests someone skulking around, unengaged. I'm not. I'm 'engaged', believe me. I have just got a slightly sad face.

I am afraid of death, scared by it. I already don't know whether I exist or not. So dying really terrifies me.

The End of the Affair is a good movie because it about things, things that really matter. Love, sex, death. Have you ever seen romance?

The worst thing for an actor is a director that gets on your nerves and says things that actually confuse you.

My kids act all the time and it's exactly what I used to do.

I'm not in denial about technology, but my mother used to say when I was a kid, 'Son, you're handless,' because I couldn't fix anything. My ambition is to be a Luddite.

If you're playing a lead, you're shaping the movie. When you're playing a supporting role, you've got only a moment to make it count.

I think great art is always ambiguous and can't be pinned down.

People often refer to my career before The Crying Game as something which led up to that point. But I was very fulfilled in what I was doing.

I see people with laptops as being enslaved to something they can't live without.

I have never been to a brothel. I don't think I could go into one.

I don't feel ashamed of my wife's political background, and I don't think she should either. I feel that the people who administered the North of Ireland for the last 20 years should be ashamed. There you are.

When you're playing the part of a saxophone or a trumpet player, both of which I have done, it would be nice to be able to play like John Coltrane, but you can't. Your job is to do something else. And I'm not sure what it is, but I don't think I'd be acting Niels Bohr any better if I went and studied physics for five years.

Acting is way of making yourself exist.

My kids act all the time and its exactly what I used to do.

I didn't want to be seen as just a guy on a list. I'm interested in good scripts, scripts that are about something, scripts that move your acting along.

I believe some people in this business suffer from fame because they behave in a famous fashion.

I've been worked over by the English press because there's an assumption that my politics are identical with my wife's, and for that matter that my wife's politics are identical with her politics of 20 years ago.

At least when you're acting you can be someone. In front of the camera you have to be yourself. And who am I?

I loved movies as a teenager and saw as much American cinema as I could, but I hated the English films of the early 60s and had absolutely no point of identification with them.

I'm enjoying it, but I still don't know why I'm hooked on acting.

I've never been in a bad play. There might have been bad productions and I might have been bad in them, but I've never been in a play that wasn't interesting or worthwhile doing on some level.

That was the beginning of modern acting for me. You don't have to tell a camera everything. It gets bored if you do and wants to look elsewhere.

You have to know who you are, if you don't you have nightmares.