Rowan Atkinson Quotes

To Be Successful You Don't Need Beautiful Face And Heroic Body, What You Need is Skillful Mind And Ability To Perform

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

I'm not a naturally funny man. I find that I can only be funny, if I become someone else.

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

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

I want to express myself in a different way. I have a performing inclination.

I can be reasonably funny and light-hearted when I'm in the company of good friends, but I'm not a jokesmith. I tend to be quite serious.

Art is something that nobody laughs at and nobody makes any money out of is the attitude, which I would dispute.

Your services might be as useful as a barbershop on the steps of a guillotine.

The path of my life is strewn with cow pats from the devil's own satanic herd!

When I was doing Bean more than I’ve done him in the last few years, I did strange things - like appearing on chat shows in character as Mr. Bean.

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

I like to juggle with one ball at a time. Then I put the ball down and do nothing for extended periods of time.

Funny things tend not to happen to me. I am not a natural comic. I need to think about things a lot before I can be even remotely amusing.

No, no, I was only funny on stage, really. 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.

Mr. Bean is at his best when he is not using words, but I am equally at home in both verbal and nonverbal expression.

To criticise a person for their race is a manifestly irrational and ridiculous. But to criticise their religion - that is a right. That is a freedom.

I would never wish to say that I've finally waved goodbye to any character, it's just that the emphasis tends to shift.

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.

The right to ridicule is far more important to society than any right not to be ridiculed because one in my view represents openness - and the other represents oppression.

I find his films about as funny as getting an arrow through the neck and discovering there's a gas bill tied to it.

It's the demand in many ways of modern television drama - it's very low key and naturalistic, and, generally speaking, the characters that I've played have not been low key and naturalistic.

I'm as poor as a church mouse, that's just had an enormous tax bill on the very day his wife ran off with another mouse, taking all the cheese.

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 have to say that I've always believed perfectionism is more of a disease than a quality. I do try to go with the flow but I can't let go.

Marketing is what gets you noticed.

A law which attempts to say you can criticise and ridicule ideas as long as they are not religious ideas is a very peculiar law indeed.

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.

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.

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

Look, if I'd wanted a lecture on the rights of man, I'd have gone to bed with Martin Luther.

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.

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.

The one thing I would never wish it to be thought is that you play serious roles in order to achieve some sort of respectability which you can't if you're playing comedic roles.

[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.

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

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

Lord, thy one-liners are as good as thy tricks. Thou art indeed an all-round family entertainer.

It's a bit disconcerting being treated like Madonna.

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

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

If you're a serious actor, it's when you know you're going to die tomorrow that you really start to feel it.

Certainly in the second film [Maigret's Dead Man], which is quite a more unpleasant and darker story, it's quite different in tone and feel.

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.

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

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

I've read about eight or ten of the original novels, and one of them is where Maigret's in bed for the entire story! His wife is running around and solving the case!

[Maigret] is more internal. I think if we made more of these I might let him out a bit.

I'm sure that a French production of this [Maigret series] would be different. For better or worse, who's to say, but probably not very good for 8 o'clock on ITV.

I tend to play rather odd men. People that are slightly odd or eccentric, or have a more particular attitude to life.