Top 115 Quotes & Sayings by Rowan Atkinson
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an English comedian Rowan Atkinson.
Last updated on April 14, 2025.
I have always worried about things more than I should.
I would return to the Blackadder character if the opportunity came up. I have no qualms about that at all.
I'm more critical of the films I make than anyone else.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
It's a bit disconcerting being treated like Madonna.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And what's interesting about him as a comic character is that the custard pie hardly ever ends up on his face.
I want to express myself in a different way. I have a performing inclination.
Mr. Bean is at his best when he is not using words, but I am equally at home in both verbal and nonverbal expression.
The older you get, the more you realise how happenstance... has helped to determine your path through life.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I like to juggle with one ball at a time. Then I put the ball down and do nothing for extended periods of time.
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.
You're about as useful as a one-legged man at an arse kicking contest.
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.
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.
I mean I can do it when I'm very relaxed, and with good friends, then I think I can be amusing.
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.
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 consider myself more of a visual comedian than a physical one.
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.
The clear problem of the outlawing of insult is that too many things can be interpreted as such. Criticism, ridicule, sarcasm, merely stating an alternative point of view to the orthodoxy, can be interpreted as insult.
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.
Nope, I don't enjoy work generally. Not because I'm lazy; it's just all so stressful and worrying.
But generally speaking, I tend to be quiet and introspective.
I'm not a collector. I don't like the toy cupboard syndrome that causes so many good cars to evaporate.
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.
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. The freedom to criticize ideas, any ideas - even if they are sincerely held beliefs - is one of the fundamental freedoms of society. A law which attempts to say you can criticize? and ridicule ideas as long as they are not religious ideas is a very peculiar law indeed.
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.
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 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.
Art is something that nobody laughs at and nobody makes any money out of is the attitude, which I would dispute.
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?
I'm not a naturally funny man. I find that I can only be funny, if I become someone else.
The path of my life is strewn with cow pats from the devil's own satanic herd!
Your services might be as useful as a barbershop on the steps of a guillotine.
Marketing is what gets you noticed.
To Be Successful You Don't Need Beautiful Face And Heroic Body, What You Need is Skillful Mind And Ability To Perform
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.
Related Authors
Bill Maher Quotes
American
Comedian
Craig Ferguson Quotes
Scottish
Comedian
David Letterman Quotes
American
Comedian
Demetri Martin Quotes
American
Comedian
Ellen DeGeneres Quotes
American
Comedian
George Carlin Quotes
American
Comedian
Jay Leno Quotes
American
Comedian
Jim Gaffigan Quotes
American
Comedian
Jimmy Fallon Quotes
American
Comedian
Joan Rivers Quotes
American
Comedian
Mitch Hedberg Quotes
American
Comedian
P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
American
Comedian
Robin Williams Quotes
American
Comedian
Rodney Dangerfield Quotes
American
Comedian
Stephen Colbert Quotes
American
Comedian
Steven Wright Quotes
American
Comedian