Rowan Atkinson Quotes - Page 3

[Georges] Simenon could be very brave like that. You never quite know what you're going to get or how the story's going to be told.

The arts community still has a long lasting cynicism of the importance, or the artistic value, of comedy. Comedy is just farting about for money.

I'm not looking for anything other than an interesting role to play.

I love both [Johnny English and James Bond] actually. The action sequences are really exciting because you're getting to work with some brilliant crew and do some great stuff but you always get some magic when you're working with actors.

But generally speaking, I tend to be quiet and introspective.

When you play a serious role, as far as I'm concerned, I feel I'm using exactly the same skills, whatever they are, to play the role as you do with something more obviously comic. It's slightly different muscles, but the same skill set.

I suddenly think the job of acting is a difficult one. It's not as flip, irrelevant and shallow a calling as I thought it was in the Eighties.

Apart from the fact that your physical ability starts to decline, I also think someone in their fifties being childlike becomes a little sad. You've got to be careful.

loved the show as a child and felt I could not do it justice. [on turning down the role of the new Doctor Who

Confronting a stadium audience, you can't see the whites of their eyes. It's just an amorphous mass of noise and, of course, you can't see the alleged billions watching at home either, so the degree to which you are intimidated is quite low.

Of course, some would say if you have a performing inclination, then you should become a lawyer. That's a platform we use, or a priest. You know, anywhere you lecture and pontificate to people.

My personal problem is that I take the business of film-making so seriously that I find it very difficult to relax.

I have always believed that there should be no subject about which one cannot make jokes, religion included. Clearly, one is always constricted by contemporary mores and trends because, after all, what one seeks above all is an appreciative audience.

I think in many ways Johnny English is a more believable character.

I would never be a television presenter. It's not something I could ever do.

It's the difficulty we had with Mr. Bean, actually, when it went from TV to film. You certainly discover that you need to explain more about a character.

The decision to do it [play Maigret] was related to the fact that the character is a very ordinary man, and generally speaking I haven't played very many ordinary men.

I consider myself more of a visual comedian than a physical one.

Johnny English is someone who really means well it's just that he's not as good as he thinks he is, and I think that maybe that's the British male in a nutshell.

I think you're bound to get a sense of any character that you play. It's not something you often do in comedy.

Without wanting to claim that I'm really like James Bond I would certainly prefer to be thought of as closer to James Bond than Mr. Bean most definitely.

The job is interesting, and the task is difficult, but the man [Maigret] is just a decent man doing a very ordinary job.

[Maigret Sets a Trap] was always going to be the first film, and it seemed to be quite a nice story. But of course it meant that here I was playing this new character for the first time, in a place where he had been a relative failure, as all these people had been murdered and the pressure was on. Rather than starting optimistically with his pipe in front of the fireplace, he was in quite a difficult place.

I'm not a collector. I don't like the toy cupboard syndrome that causes so many good cars to evaporate.

For telling a good and incisive religious joke, you should be praised. For telling a bad one, you should be ridiculed and reviled. The idea that you could be prosecuted for the telling of either is quite fantastic.