Jonathan Rhys Meyers's Quotes

The hardest part about acting is realizing it doesn't matter.

When little kids come up to me, I'm a fully-grown adult, and that's always weird to me.

You go through your 20s sort of like a chrysalis in many ways, stretching into your own skin and trying to bust out of a cocoon.

Going after a part in Hollywood is like being a gladiator in ancient Rome. When it comes down to getting a role, you don't have any friends, you're incredibly competitive and any actor who tells you different is lying.

I don't love acting. How can you love something when you sit around 12 hours a day and work 10 minutes a day? I'm just doing it because it keeps me off the streets and out of jail.

I was just a kid and I didn't have a dad. That's hard, because when you're a kid, you blame yourself for everything. And I blamed myself for him not being around, for my parents not being together.

I wouldn't date an actress. There's only room for one actor in my life and I'm it. Too difficult. On the one hand, they understand the job. But on the other hand, it's very competitive within the relationship. Two actors, say one becomes a mega-star and the other doesn't.

I'm a one-woman guy. I think that if you can find someone you want to spend the rest of your life with, you should marry them instantly, and try to stay married.

I've never gone to acting school and I never will, so I'm learning about the business from the people who are in the business. It doesn't seem like I work at all. And the unknown is always exciting.

It can take a long time for some people to find out how to ground themselves, and film sets are an odd atmosphere to do it in - especially if, like me, you finished school early.

That's a funny thing, fame. People definitely do treat you differently. When you begin to be successful, people say, 'Don't go changing.' Well, that's easy to say, but the fact is, you don't change at all - other people do.

You know what I like to do on a Sunday morning? Clean my house. I really enjoy it; it's my ritual. I require tidiness, actually. I have to have everything spotless before I can relax.

As a kid, I spent an awful lot of time pretending I was somebody else. I think growing up in the 1980s wasn't very exciting so you kind of create this secret life of an alternate person. You pretend to be whatever you need to be that day, so you live in that dream world.

No one picked on me for my lunch money. Probably because it was the 1980s and no one had lunch money.

A lot of my success is because of what I look like. I know that.

Celebrity has lost its value - all you have to do is go on a reality TV show for six weeks and everybody knows your name.

Could I imagine myself as king? Of course I could.