“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.”

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

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

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.

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

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.

In the modern media age, we are rarely surprised by what we see.

Excellence is not an act but a habit.

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

I enjoy racing historic motorcars from the ’50s and ’60s.

I don’t think you should be too absolutist about what you play and what you don’t play.

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

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’m not particularly intellectual or clever or minority-focused in my creative instincts.

Marketing is what gets you noticed.

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.

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

All those images are being produced basically the same way, through a lens and a camera.

I am semi-ambivalent about being on camera – sort of low-key. I don’t like being on camera stuff that much.

The camera will never compete with the brush and the palette, until such time as photographs can be taken in Heaven or Hell.

If the thrill of hunting were in the hunt, or even in the marksmanship, a camera would do just as well.

I remember weeping behind the camera, because I was so moved by the way they connected.

… photography, like all camera-made images such as film and video, effaces the marks of its making (and maker) at the click of a shutter. A photograph appears to be self-generated – as though it had created itself.

I grew up in the ’60s, which was a creative time, so it wasn’t that big of a stretch to go from a baseball bat to a guitar to a film camera.

I have received the digital camera as a blessing. It has really changed my life as a filmmaker, because I don’t use my camera anymore as a camera. I don’t feel it as a camera.