80 Quotes by Mark Rylance

You need to gain the confidence that you're doing enough on film. You must resist the temptation to do too much.

I'm quite simple, really. I like to play and inhabit my character. I really like to inhabit the situation. It's the situation that intrigues me.

You feel a lot of rage when someone dies. I have a lot of faith in nature, but it can be cruel.

Nature is very cruel. It is much riskier to love any living being than not. I'm painfully aware that even my little dog is a walking bundle of mortality. I'm painfully aware he's going to pass.

As a leader, you get a pat on the back when you make a hard choice.

I think the idea that life ends when we physically die is as painful as the idea in Cromwell's time that there's some awful purgatory, and you have to give money to the Catholic church to get your loved ones out. I certainly have experienced a lot of evidence that there's a consciousness that isn't physical.

Pretty much all children are helpful to act with; they lack any guile when they act.

I didn't particularly aim to be a Shakespeare actor, but I suppose I had a certain gift or it; I certainly got offered lots of it. I liked Complicite and Shared Experience and Kick Theatre, and all the small theatre companies that were getting going. I wanted to be like that, making original theatre.

My understanding is that we are generally a very philanthropic and compassionate people - that when there are disasters in the world, individual citizens send loads of money into appeals for different things. We're a bloody violent people, football fans, and we've been successful at wars, and we sell far too many weapons.