On the notion of power and what it takes to achieve it:

"What it takes to get power, right, that's the kind of - syndrome. What you have to do, how much you have to sacrifice yourself, little by little, in pursuit of the thing that you thought you needed, or thought you couldn't live without, and then you only understand too late that you can't, you can't retrieve your soul. It's gone, it's torn, maybe a deadening too. I don't know, maybe there is an incremental deadening of the heart. But so much of that experience would have involved betrayals, betrayals of oneself and betrayals of others. So, betrayal becomes very much a part of life, the expectation of that life becomes connected - with betrayal and exploitation."

Daniel Day Lewis on whether he understands America after learing the origins of the nation:

"Well, it's one aspect of the nation, I think. I think it's probably too much to allow this story to be a parable for the entire development of a nation, but there is something in it, certainly, there is some reflection in it. You know, really, when we start, when we start the story, the late 19th century, it's only barely industrialized. I mean oil at that time, you know, I'm mining for silver at the beginning of the film, not for oil. So silver would have been a valid commodity to get a hold of. Oil... you know there came a moment were somehow the great defining moment in the industrialization of the country, which I found fascinating reading about it, was when they managed to convince the railways to convert from steam to oil. Because before that, oil was really a lubricant and it was distilled into products like kerosene for lamps and so on. So it didn't represent the possibility of wealth beyond all imagining at that stage. But as soon as the railways converted, and then afterwards ships and so on and so forth, then oil was the thing."

On the treatment of preachers in the film and how he views them:

"It depends... my tendency in the face of, you know, any - people that stand on boxes and make loud moral pronouncements. I tend to assume there is something going on behind that. I mean, I have met people who I considered to be very profoundly ethical people in the way that they live their lives, and they tend not to talk about it. So moralizing of any kind I find hard to take, like headlines of The Daily Mail, kind of. You know what I mean?"

Lewis on whether awards appeal to him:

"Do I like awards? It can be very, very rewarding, yeah. Yes, it can be. It wouldn't always be in every circumstance, but certainly it can be if you feel that it is genuinely meant and hasn't been given erroneously, although - but also in the endless struggle of grandiosity and humility, which anyone in the public I suppose has to keep on in returning back to a sense of absurdity. I think you'd be utterly lost without a sense of absurdity, and of course to take a group of performers all of whom have done something which is not in any way comparable to the other things that have been offered, it does seem very, very strange to be involved in that. In that kind of horserace sometime, but at the same time, I mean, everyone likes getting prizes, don't they?"

Daniel Day Lewis on what makes Paul Thomas Anderson so unique:

"What he has in common with other good directors, he has - he understands that the essential thing for an actor, I suppose, is a sense of freedom within which they might search for something they feel they need to search for. And he creates a field upon which he might be able to do that, might be able. There is no guarantee you are going to find that thing, but at the very least he allows you to look for it with a great sense of freedom. And that sounds easy to say but it's not something that is that common. The work on a set can often - you struggle against the restrictiveness sometimes of a working situation. That's never the case with Paul. There has to be the possibility of chaos, there for it to make some sense. But at the very least, you need to play with the idea of chaos, I think."