Stephen Rea Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”