We all have our time machines, don’t we. Those that take us back are memories…And those that carry us forward, are dreams.
-Jeremy Irons
What takes us back to the past are the memories. What brings us forward is our dreams.
-Jeremy Irons
We all have our time machines. Some take us back, they’re called memories. Some take us forward, they’re called dreams.
-Jeremy Irons
When it seems that someone has shattered your dreams….pick up even the smallest of pieces and use them to build bigger and better dreams.
-Jeremy Irons
It’s just money; it’s made up. Pieces of paper with pictures on it so we don’t have to kill each other just to get something to eat.
-Jeremy Irons
There are a group of people who are managing the world to their advantage and who just look to the rest of us as people who will buy their products and fund their salaries.
-Jeremy Irons
So the better my partner or my opposition, however you like to think about it, the better my game.
-Jeremy Irons
The great thing about acting is, because you’re constantly playing other characters and exploring yourself because you have to find those other characters in yourself, you sort of broaden as a person over your life because you’ve been other people. So you can empathize with many different sorts of people. It’s great in that way and I hope, therefore, as you get older as an actor, you not only get more interesting because you lived more, but you get a bit wiser as a person.
-Jeremy Irons
I’ve never been passionate about acting, and I find more and more that I work to live the life I want to live. […] There’s something about the detachment I have, the feeling of the lack of importance about what I do, that is healthy.
-Jeremy Irons
I was not naturally intellectual, but somebody whose interest had to be whetted, still the case sadly.
-Jeremy Irons
You think, you don’t just speak. The lines come off the thoughts.
-Jeremy Irons
I’m very glad I’m not a politician. I think it’s one step away from the gates of hell, being a politician. I really do. It`s a nightmare.
-Jeremy Irons
I get bored very easily, so I love doing different things, changing, doing a job for a month and then doing another one for six months and then moving into a different group of people. I love being able to stop. That’s one of the greatest benefits we have in our profession.
-Jeremy Irons
I love being part of a group who tells stories, whether it be in the theater or in cinema, and I love creating imaginary worlds rather as children do, but I never had a burning desire to act, but it just sort of suited me.
-Jeremy Irons
One always returns to the fact that there are just too many of us, the population continues to rise and it’s unsustainable.
-Jeremy Irons
Sadly, one’s parameters are constantly narrowed by one’s success.
-Jeremy Irons
I certainly play people on the edge quite a lot. I am interested in what makes people odd and what makes them different. In life I try to play the edges. I have a horror of the herd. There are many, many different sorts of people. A lot of people are fairly uninteresting. I want to play the interesting ones. The villains are always more interesting to portray. Shakespeare knew that.
-Jeremy Irons
I think nobody since has written such extraordinary work as Shakespeare writes. The characters he writes are full of inconsistencies, which is a great human quality – I mean we’re all very inconsistent in the way we behave.
-Jeremy Irons
To be an actor you need various things. You need to have a head for choosing the roles. You have to be, hopefully, easy to work with so people enjoy working with you. You have to deal with missing roles, with not being asked to work, with doing good work and then being castigated by the critics for it. You have to have a skin that can deal with all of that. I, fortunately, seem to have the makeup which allows me to deal with the business. I mean, not as everybody.
-Jeremy Irons
I have to say that I’ve reached the state of my career where I quite like not to work. Strange enough, I’m busier than ever. I’m not spending every waking hour beside a telephone waiting for it to ring.
-Jeremy Irons
Making movies can actually be quite boring, there’s a lot of sitting around and waiting. Unless you really believe in the story and love the character, and unless you really need the money, I don’t see the point in doing it.
-Jeremy Irons
Actors often behave like children, and so we’re taken for children. I want to be grown up.
-Jeremy Irons
Most people are robust. If a man puts his hand on a woman’s bottom, any woman worth her salt can deal with it. It is communication. Can’t we be friendly?
-Jeremy Irons
And whenever I’m in a situation where I’m wearing the same as 600 other people and doing the same thing as 600 other people, looking back, I always found ways to make myself different, whether it be having a red lining inside of my jacket, having red shoes, it hasn’t changed.
-Jeremy Irons