Quotes By Rowan Atkinson

I feel as though the camera is almost a kind of voyeur in Mr. Bean's life, and you just watch this bizarre man going about his life in the way that he wants to.

Mr. Bean is essentially a child trapped in the body of a man. All cultures identify with children in a similar way, so he has this bizarre global outreach.

Not so much in Canada, but certainly in the US, as I'm sure you know, money is all, and if they can get another 26 programs of the same thing even though it advances the culture or those actor's careers not at all it doesn't matter.

I mean I can do it when I'm very relaxed, and with good friends, then I think I can be amusing.

To criticize a person for their race is manifestly irrational and ridiculous, but to criticize their religion, that is a right. That is a freedom.

I have always worried about things more than I should.

You're about as useful as a one-legged man at an arse kicking contest.

I think the character does tend to suit an episodic thing, because what's fun about him is that he doesn't care about anyone else, and it's very difficult for a main character - a lead character - in a movie to not care about anybody else.

And what's interesting about him as a comic character is that the custard pie hardly ever ends up on his face.

I think I have an inner confidence that my tastes are pretty simple, that what I find funny finds a wide audience. I'm not particularly intellectual or clever or minority-focused in my creative instincts. And I'm certainly not aware of suppressing more sophisticated ambitions.

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.

It's a bit disconcerting being treated like Madonna.

I have always regarded Mr. Bean as a timeless, ageless character, and I would rather he be remembered as a character mostly in his 30s and 40s.

I would return to the Blackadder character if the opportunity came up. I have no qualms about that at all.

But, actually, so many of the clerics that I've met, particularly the Church of England clerics, are people of such extraordinary smugness and arrogance and conceitedness who are extraordinarily presumptuous about the significance of their position in society.

Nope, I don't enjoy work generally. Not because I'm lazy; it's just all so stressful and worrying.

And, we put a lot more value, or at least I personally put a lot more value, on the creative values and creative challenges of something than the commercial necessities.

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

I don't much enjoy Back and Forth. I mean, I think it has its own particular qualities, but I think it's inferior to any of the half-hour ones we did.

No, no, I was only funny on stage, really. I, I, think I was funny as a person toward my classmates when I was very young. You know, when I was a child, up to about the age of 12.

But I always feel that whatever I do, I could do better. I suppose it is perfectionism.

It's not easy to take a sit-com and turn it into a feature.

Monty Python crowd; half of them came from Cambridge, and half of them came from Oxford. But, there seems to be this jewel, this sort of two headed tradition of doing comedy, of doing sketches, and that kind of thing.

People think because I can make them laugh on the stage, I'll be able to make them laugh in person. That isn't the case at all. I am essentially a rather quiet, dull person who just happens to be a performer.

I'm more critical of the films I make than anyone else.

Marketing is what gets you noticed, and that side of it something - this side of it, if you like, doing interviews - is the side of it that I least enjoy, and yet is 50% of the project.

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

We still have a tradition certainly in English television; it's faded a bit in the last five years, but we still have a tradition where the important thing is the quality and the challenging nature of the programming.

In TV, and in particular in commercials, you don't really need to explain very much at all - you just say he's a spy and he's a little bit theatrical and overblown and smug and he's not very good at his job.

The older you get, the more you realise how happenstance... has helped to determine your path through life.