100 Quotes by Colin Farrell

I've never seen a moon in the sky that, if it didn't take my breath away, at least misplaced it for a moment.

Vampires have always held a very seductive kind of lore and have always been some variety of attractive, whether it's attractiveness that's born of just the physical attributes that they have - this kind of ethereal beauty or translucent pallor - or whether it is more to do with the way they carry themselves.

Beauty is undefinable in language. It's something that you see when you see it, or you feel when you feel it, or you hear when you hear it. It usually encompasses all five of the senses. It can't exist without it being a somehow sensorial experience. But, I don't think it's quantifiable. Nothing is really quantifiable. Nothing is certain in love and friendship. We all try to understand these things.

Being Irish is very much a part of who I am. I take it everywhere with me.

I will say that as I get older and calmer and quieter in my own self, the one quality in a woman that I find more and more attractive is kindness. A sense of adventure and humor is important too, but I truly find kindness and consideration for others to be the most attractive thing in anyone.

I know what the important things are in life. I know that just because I pretend to be someone else for two hours on the silver screen doesn't make me a better person than the next man. So, I mind all those things. Simple things.

Desperation will allow you to do incredible things in the name of survival.

I've done far too many things that I felt were going to be genius that weren't and I've done some things that I didn't think were going to be much that really connected with people. So expectations are left at the door. But hope exists all the time.

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Girl trouble, for me, is when you fall in love.

But I dare not think too far into the future on the risk that I'll miss the present.

I got to work with Jared Leto. Jared's cute. Oh, I'll tell you. Jared will make you doubt about your sexuality.

Every week a tsunami rips through poor towns and villages all over the world ... That tsunami is hunger.

I think, as human beings, we at times overvalue the intellect and we undermine the body. I don't mean a body externally and the shape of a body. I mean the intelligence of a body, the memories that a body can store, how a body feels emotion, and how a body processes emotion.

Every week a tsunami rips through poor towns and villages all over the world. It claims 25,000 lives a day, 175,000 a week. It sweeps children from the arms of their mothers, robs hundreds of millions of any hope for the future. That tsunami is hunger. Help us end it now.

You move on. It's work. Yeah, I'm privileged and paid handsomely and it's not exactly being in a coal mine, but you still work your ass off and you work as hard as you possibly can and you hope that people connect to it and enjoy it.

You know. I'll try anything. I'll do anything. I'll explore. Try different takes. All that kind of stuff to do sometimes, to do good performances, but always conducive to having a good time creatively.

Yeah loads of bruises and welts, usually around the hip, arse, thigh region and elbows. Elbows got knocked up big time, but it was so much fun. I hadn't done a meaty action film in seven or eight years, so it was fun to explore that aspect of storytelling again.

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Pain seems to be easier, or melancholy seems to be easier to portray in a character. I don't know if that's because I'm a human being or because I'm an Irishman or both.

I get excited about room-service menus! I really do.

Women tend to immediately take responsibility if somebody messes up with both of us saying it's our fault. Men are quite happy for it to be your fault it seems like.

The first time you hold your baby in your arms, I mean, a sense of strength and love washes over you. It washed over me and I never thought that possible.

I do have the ability to explore life and to be over the moon at the smallest thing - a few pints and a craic in the pub and I'm in heaven. But I have a melancholy side to me as well. Acting allows me to feel things, it kind of buys me human experience. And I don't mean this as acting as higher cause, because it's not, but it does kind of have a higher awareness emotionally.

You have a certain objectivity, as a member of the audience, and you can come away maybe being provoked into a certain discourse or a certain arena of questioning, regarding how you would deal with things that your character has to deal with. Whereas when you're doing a film, once you start asking, "What would I do?," you're getting the distance greater between yourself and the character, or you're bringing the character to you, which I think is self-serving, in the wrong way. The idea is to bring yourself to the character.

I don't go to the gym or practice yoga. And the closest thing I have to a nutritionist is the Carlsberg Beer Company. I just have the appetite of a pigeon.

I love the grandiosity, how sweepingly entertaining films can be. And I think there's a place for films that pry more into the human condition.

I mean, we are tribal by nature, and sometimes success and material wealth can divide and separate - it's not a new philosophy I'm sharing - more than hardship, hardship tends to unify.

I think I'm still trying to find my feet as an actor. And I know it ain't brain surgery, but it confuses me and it comes between me and my sleep a lot.

I'll try anything. I'll do anything. I'll explore. Try different takes.

You're scrutinized all through your life - you're scrutinized by your family, by yourself, by society, and your friends in a certain way, shape, or form.

I did loads of auditions and I didn't get called back. I still get giddy at all the people I get to work with, and I'm still enjoying the work and enjoying life too much that I don't feel like I've done that much.

I've realized as well after five years of being on the road that if I'm going to four or five months of my life to something even if I'm overpaid, it's four or five months of my life away from home, away from my son, away from family and friends. I better believe in it on some level even if it's a big movie.

Seven years sober. I'm really grateful. It's really lovely to be present in my life.

Around the world there are certain marital systems, certain physical systems, political systems, social systems, and all those things are kind of turned on their head but represented in various ways within "The Lobster."

Hollywood. It lacks originality. Remake sucks.' But I had to look deeper into it from my own perspective. We are not trying to compete with the original at all and that's what allowed me to pull the trigger without any hesitancy.

I certainly do believe in monogamy. I don't believe that it's for everyone. I don't believe that marriage is for everyone. So much of life is begging to be chosen how it wants to be lived. Much more than most of us realize.

An actor said recently that, unless you're a parent, you shouldn't play a parent in a film. I don't know who said it, but I disagree. I understand that maybe there are aspects that you don't understand, or maybe this actor or actress had a really strong recent experience with having their first or second or third born child. I don't know. As a dad, I get that. I get that there is no love like it. But, at the same time, love is love.

The sea always offers up incredible stories of survivors' fortitude. Myths of a lot of countries have variations on that.

Life is apogee, apex, decline; life is death - and everything else is open to discussion.

I've got plenty of love in my life already in the form of my sons and a few good friends who I value dearly.

I personally just want to do as many different things as I can do, whether it's comedy, drama, science fiction, horror, narrator... You've got a documentary, I've got a voice. Animated films. Big films, small films.

That's the process of making the film and it isn't until the world puts their eyes to it that you find out if it's creating any kind of connection at all. But every single film at some stage of the film I think, "I wonder what this is going to be?"

It's not that I'm stupid. I just don't think sometimes.

I'm just a true Irish boy at heart. I'm just myself, I stick by my guns and I treat people the way I think they should be treated, regardless of their status. And I just have a laugh.

I'm not going to experience the reality of hardship that sometimes my characters live in. I'm very cautious about that.

The idea of implanting memories where by the implantee couldn't tell the difference between a real experience and a fantasy experience was really cool. And his ideas of technology - do we control technology or does technology begin to control us? His work hasn't aged a day it seems.

Making a film, you're in a really dark tunnel and the only kind of illumination is the shared experience you're having with your fellow cast and director.

Magic is at the core of myths.

At the end of the day, it's all one version of telling a story. I treated this as if it was a two million dollar independent film. I did a lot more physical work than I'd probably have to do for a two million dollar independent film with four months of training and stuff. But as far as the character's psychology or emotional life goes, I treat it just the same.

I was never an A student, but I was really well behaved until I was 13 or so.

I think people are propelled towards violence, and what propels them is much more interesting than the actual act of violence itself.

[Yorgos Lanthimos] is really a master I feel, I really do.

I think that is what you want to do as a cinemagoer - to experience something fully. Some things don't let you experience them fully. It may be your own preordained prejudice where you can't experience them fully. But when you come out of the cinema having felt, thought, and experienced your way through two hours, that is a really cool thing.

You have the upmost amount of energy because you're not just having a cocktail at the end of the night. You're actually not drinking alcohol and you're keeping your body really clean and it's an amazing feeling to be getting out all the toxins.

It doesn't matter if it's a drama or a comedy, the need to get the emotion and the character arc across is way harder in something like this so was more of a preparation.

One of the great things about the film being so unusual and provocative is the filmmaker to me doesn't seem to have a definite opinion on the rights or wrongs or the immorality of behaviors and systems, he just presents a set of very unusual circumstances and asked the audience to partake in the judging of what feels right or wrong or what feels natural and unnatural.

I think people enjoy "The Lobster" because people respond to original things, but I think they only respond to original things if they connect to some truths within us.

As much as "The Lobster" feels like a world we recognize but not the world we live in, it's all drawn in an allegorical way from all the systems that exist.

I didn't work with any of the beasts [ "Fantastic Beasts"], I didn't have much green screen, but I loved working on it. I'm excited to see it myself.

On "[Total] Recall" also [sets were extraordinary], but this was next-level. They built two or three blocks of midtown Manhattan in 1926 and it was inhabited with 400 extras and 24 Model Ts and a train system and all that kind of nonsense. It was madness. You would walk into shops and they would have the goods from that period, it was just huge.

The level of backlash [for the True Detective] was kind of fascinating and not fully shocking because I know what the world of the internet is and how it's a platform to project their greatest anger and frustrations. But it's also a place where people can wax lyrical and be effusive in their glowing fondness of something.

I was disappointed, but I kind of knew it was going to be an uphill struggle because of how strong the first season [of "True Detective"] was.

You dream to eat whatever you can and get away with it and then when you're told you have to eat, it loses its fun straight away.

I called Nic Pizzolatto and he said, "No, no. You're in it the whole way through." That was fun to shoot [in The Lobster]. I had a few scenes in that show that were some of my favorite all-time scenes to be in.

When I read the script it was extraordinary and to work with Yorgos [Lanthimos] again was amazing.

Most of actor's work is done at home, in your hotel room, in the wee hours of the morning thinking and reading and feeling, walking around and listening to music. It really just because an internal exercise, whatever skills. It's great if you have to learn something new for a gig and designing a character physically is always fun but it does become an internal exercise in separating the wheat from the chaff.

I had a list of about 35 restaurants, 25 of which were fast-food joints all around Los Angeles and I didn't get a quarter through the list. It just became me thinking about going to these places and wanting to enjoy the food and food just not being enjoyable anymore.

I love working with horses. People say you shouldn't work with animals and children; that's wrong. You must only work with children, because you only work eight hours a day and I love working with animals. Animals have an honesty that human beings reach to find in their lives at the best of times.

It as an argument between the world of emotion versus the world of the intellect. It's the idea that you can suppress a person's mind and a person's experiences, mentally, psychologically and intellectually, but you can't completely quiet them to the point of dormancy and the emotionally life a person. You still have the heart and what the heart remembers and what the heart experiences. And even that isn't important that that comes across.

Initially, less appealing to me than the idea of a vampire that is drawn by some misgiving or drawn by some sense of longing that he can't quite satiate.

I mean you can go wherever you want with it really. No matter what story you're telling you're always representing some reality. You are always representing human beings, their fears, their shortcomings, their braveries, their doubts, their loves, their abilities, their brilliance and those things inevitably lead to bigger political systems, foreign policy and crime and religion. It's an action film. We are not taking a stance about big government.

Audiences will see what they want to see. Some will come out, hopefully enjoying two hours of action. Some people will find themselves gravitating towards the emotional dilemma that the characters find themselves in. Other people will see that there is some layer of subversions to the storytelling aspect of poking a finger of judgment at certain governments to the idea of foreign invasion, others maybe false pretenses.

I just adored working in London. It was in London where I first had the idea of making a film.

If you do a fifteen hour day on a film, there's a lot of time standing around but at the end of that, you want to go home to your hotel room and have a bite to eat, watch a movie and go to bed.

If you need to get in physical shape for a film and you have to maintain that for six months, at the start of the film, I was never able to do it.

Sometimes I have experienced at the start of a film you're very excited and enthusiastic and you've done all your preparation internally and externally and you start the film and it's all go... Then your attention goes somewhere else. Your energy goes into telling the story, so you don't have the same amount of energy to be objective, and that's okay because sometimes you become a subject of the story and you're inside it so much that you don't need to keep on looking on the outside.

There was a part of me that felt afraid of people in Hollywood going: '**** Hollywood with their total lack of originality!'.

It can be a bit annoying if another actor is trying to talk to the director and the wife is sitting on his lap.

You consciously look after yourself, whatever that may be to you, whether it's going out for a few drinks and a bit of dinner, or just hitting the couch and watching TV, or going to the gym or yoga class. Just being aware that there's a potential for you to be in it and respecting wherever you find yourself is good enough.

It's so technical. It's nothing personal. You're not fighting really, you're missing each other by a half of foot at least, ideally more and you get a few knocks and bruises. But with the kissing, you do kiss someone. Its lips on lips.

I just recently realized. It's very strange. But doing fight scenes with Kate [Beckinsale], I was little bit more cautious. You can go harder with a guy, which I don't mean as an insult.

From my experience, the only thing you can do is take what's written on the page and try, through your own curiosity and investigation, to make it your own and honor what the original intent was.

I think there were six or eight weeks between 'Total Recall' and 'Seven Psychopaths.' I was at home in Los Angeles for 'Seven Psychopaths,' so it was the first time I had worked from my house here so it was great to be around the kids.

I've started films like Miami Vice where I'm in really good shape and I look back on that film and see the moustache is bigger as I've got a larger face.

I remember some of the sets on "Alexander" were extraordinary and it would just take your breath away.

Anything that's different from your own realm of experience as a human being, whether it's driving a car or a boat, or using guns, anything that separates you from yourself and leads you more towards this character's existence is a big help.

But we're born as children and we look at the world with open eyes... And we don't judge and we don't betray. We're not jealous. We're not envious. We're not even weary, which is a danger also as kids. They have to learn a certain amount of awareness.

I'm not keen on cars and motorbikes. I tried to be a biker, but it wasn't me - I bought a Harley-Davidson and dumped it.

I'm not going to lie, there are more interesting ways to spend your time than answering questions about yourself. But if there were no questions to ask me, I might have a beef with that.

Allow your head to be quiet. Allow it to be still. Just for an hour and half. Just deal with your body & your breath.

I take acting very seriously. I put everything I have and know into it.