Rowan Atkinson Quotes

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'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.

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

I love walking in the rain because no one can see me crying

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

Get that right, then- if you get the quality right, then the marketability or whatever; your ability to sell videos or your ability to earn money or whatever, will follow naturally. But try to be creatively lead rather than market lead. And that's important to me.

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.

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

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

As hatred is defined as intense dislike, what is wrong with inciting intense dislike of a religion, if the activities or teachings of that religion are so outrageous, irrational or abusive of human rights that they deserve to be intensely disliked?

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

•"As I was leaving this morning, I said to myself, 'The last thing you must do is forget your speech.' And, sure enough, as I left the house this morning, the last thing I did was to forget my speech.

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

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

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

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.

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

The Scarlet Pimpernel is the most over-rated human being since Judas Iscariot won the A.D.31 'Best Disciple' competition.

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.

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

There is always that age-old thing about England and America being divided by a common language. You think that because we speak English and you speak English that you're bound to understand and like everything that we do. And of course you don't.

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

Marketing is what gets you noticed.

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

I have always worried about things more than I should.

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.

I'm very good at having time off. I tend to take whole years off - I had 1994 and 1997 off. I find it very easy; I just love pottering around doing normal things.

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

Having spent a substantial part of my career parodying religious figures from my own Christian background, I am aghast at the notion that it could, in effect, be made illegal to imply ridicule of a religion or to lampoon religious figures.

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.

I have a problem with Porsches. They're wonderful cars, but I know I could never live with one. Somehow, the typical Porsche people-and I wish them no ill-are not, I feel, my kind of people. I don't go around saying that Porsches are a pile of dung, but I do know that psychologically I couldn't handle owning one.

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

I've no desire to hang around with a bunch of upper-class delinquents, do twenty minutes' work and then spend the rest of the day loafing about in Paris drinking gallons of champagne and having dozens of moist, pink, highly experienced French peasant girls galloping up and down my - hang on ...

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

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.

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

In the modern media age we are rarely surprised by what we see. Whether it's on television or film or in the theatre, everything is so advertised, so trailed, that most entertainment is merely what you thought it was going to be like.

I enjoy racing historic motorcars from the '50s and '60s. The seed of my interest was planted when I was about 12 years old and took over my mother's Morris Minor. I drove it around my father's farm. But my favorite car is still a McLaren F1, which I have had for 10 years.

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.