Maybe this is just me, but as time goes by, I'm more bewildered by modernity. It gets more unfathomable with every passing year.
— Dylan Moran
I'm just trying to understand what's around me as much as anyone else is, really. To draw a bead on a moving target.
I wouldn't be in a huge hurry to go back to Kansas. It was just bizarre. There's a lot of very, very heavy set people who believe in whatever they were told, because they didn't seem to get out very much or be interested in leaving where they were. They just didn't seem that curious, and I find that a little hard to deal with.
I don't watch a whole lot of stand up. Mainly I prefer to read writers; they make me laugh the most. Something gets you when you're alone and someone's voice is coming through their work. There's a different quality to it that stays with you a bit more.
I don't want to do panel games or adverts. I really like challenges. I always get roles as an art teacher or a photographer. In the future I want to play something like a mugger/assassin/pastry chef.
If you're a comic, you don't have a rehearsal room; you rehearse on stage. My main concern is remembering everything. I've written lots of material, but how do you memorise 90 minutes? That's one hell of a long speech. I've always had problems with that.
You know, people sometimes say to me, 'Do you prefer to do this or that, act or do stand-up or write' but the thing that I enjoy most is the difference between all of them, because you're always learning. I don't go around thinking of myself as a great anything. I'm actually lucky to have the chance to fail at all of them.
The truth is that I'm constitutionally incapable of doing an ordinary job.
I don't want to do the same thing over and over again.
Showing off seemed to me to be a highly valuable and necessary activity when I was 20.
Yeah, I think Michael has had to deal with that label of being Michael Caine for a long time.
I never thought I want to do anything, really, except not go to work properly and turn up at the same place every day and eat sandwiches in the same canteen, if I can possibly help it, as I don't think I'd be very good at it.
We are both drawn to surreal situations so the writing was a joy.
Black Books adheres to a more old fashioned, traditional sitcom format, which I think works, because in its own way, it's quite theatrical.
When I was young, all the politicians looked like ancient Latin teachers or greengrocers. They were mumbly, stumbly men with their hair blowing in their eyes, walking into trees, opening the wrong door. They had no idea how to present themselves.
You have to assume that you're talking to the most intelligent, tuned-in audience you could ever get. That's the way you're going to get the best out of people. Whether they know you or not shouldn't matter for comedy. They should get to know you pretty quickly. and they should be having a good time pretty quickly.
America's work ethic is non-stop; it's not even enshrined in law that workers have to get their two weeks holiday money. But Americans work harder than everyone else I can think of.
I never really had a career, to be honest with you. I never in my life sat down and planned it. I have thought, 'Oh, I'd like to do this,' like anybody would. But I'm not the type that says, 'If I do this, it will lead to that.'
You can't please everyone, nor should you seek to, because then you won't please anyone, least of all yourself.
I grew up in a house where there was lots of teasing and language play and laughter; it was very important. When I was a teenager, you wouldn't go to a bar and find lots of televisions everywhere. People were talking. Talk was the mental fire you would gather around in the evening. It occupied a big part of your existence.
It's true that I have spoken about doing a book before, but then everyone you speak to is planning to write a book.
If I hadn't done this I might have ended up digging the roads.
I think that women just have a primeval instinct to make soup, which they will try to foist on anybody who looks like a likely candidate.
I have a very low level of recognition, which is fine by me.
You try various things when you're growing up. I was an attache in the Foreign Service for a while and then I drove a bulldozer, but neither of those panned out for me so it had to be stand-up.
One thing that's coming up a lot is: are you as grumpy as you appear from this Black Books thing.
You achieve the surreal jokes through the realism by making it elastic.
The trend now is to get away from stage bound sitcoms.
People will kill you over time, and how they'll kill you is with tiny, harmless phrases, like 'be realistic.'
What I prefer is an audience who listen. And are intelligent. Which I try and assume every audience is. And that if something goes wrong, it's generally my fault and not theirs.
I'm really not big on nationalism, to be honest with you. I really don't think it gets people anywhere except near a pile of dead bodies. I'm Irish, yeah, but I don't need to get up on a soapbox about it.
I don't go to different countries to criticise their political system and tell them what they should be doing - what do I know?
When things are going well, I can't write fast enough to keep up with my mind. Writing walks, speech runs and talk flies. Other times, though, it's like fishing.
You're not going to learn anything if you're not prepared to go flat, so I'm very happy to go flat.
I'm actually about as famous as a fourth division footballer from the 70s.
In the same way, there is some creature gnawing away inside of me, urging me to do things in different ways.
I don't really think of myself as an actor.
I think a lot of the time you just parody yourself.
I have no qualifications to do anything else and there weren't any formal application forms you had to fill in for stand-up, so I thought I'd give that a twist.
The characters can't be wittier than people are in real life. They have to be character witty.
I thought The Office was good, though I didn't think of it as a sitcom, just as a very good programme.
