Quotes

No. I don't talk about the family. This is kind of an on-going thing that gets, honestly, to be kind of tiresome, only because, you know, you meet people in Boston and they say, 'Boy, what's it like to wake up with Jamie Lee Curtis?' Well, you know what? We've been married for 12 years, and we have kids, and it's not like we're living some bizarre life here. We go home and we wear sweatpants and the baby takes a dump and we change the diaper. I don't mean to put you off here, but I just tend not to talk about it.

Comedy is like music. You have to know the key and you have to find players with good chops.

People want me to be funny all the time. They think I'm being funny no matter what I say or do and that's not the case. I rarely joke unless I'm in front of a camera. It's not what I am in real life. It's what I do for a living.

I spent more time in America, but I developed a very English sense of humour. I clicked into it deeply with Peter Sellers, who is still probably my favourite comedian. I loved The Goons and then I got into "Beyond the Fringe" and by accident I met Jonathan Miller and those guys. And, of course, they led straight to [Monty] Python.

"Silliness framed in intelligence. Even when it's stupid, you know intelligent people are doing it and that makes it a different joke. Stupid comedy over here [in America] is just plain stupid. It's moronic and I don't find it funny at all." - when asked to define the tradition of English humor.

"It's real acting, in a sense. You're reacting spontaneously to things you've never heard before. You can either do it or not, and if you're with a bunch of people who can, there's nothing more fun." - on improvised acting.

I liked directing The Big Picture (1989). I was happy with it, but I remembered working on "Spinal Tap" and what a joy it was to make and how much we made each other laugh.

The movies have a way of seeping out there over time. We don't put them in 2,000 theaters. It wouldn't work that way.

But I am interested in the notion that people can become so obsessed by their world that they lose sense and awareness of how they appear to other people. They're so earnest about it. But that's true of so many things.

I don't work with high-concept things that start with a premise, "Wouldn't it be funny if there was this spy who met a ..." For me, it could be, "What about people who sell shoes? That must be a bizarre world ... when they meet at conventions and talk about shoes."

On being banned (as a hereditary peer) from the House of Lords: There's no question that the old system was unfair. I mean, why should you be born to this? But now it's all just sheer cronyism. The Prime Minister can put in whoever he wants and bus them in to vote. The Upper House should be an elected body, it's that simple.

[on people-watching and eavesdropping] I love airport lounges. Los Angeles is a bad place for me, because there's so little street life or public space. The good places are New York, London and Paris, where behavior is out in the open. Basically, my whole job is to look at people in public and watch the way they behave and listen to them talk.

[on those few years he sat in the House of Lords] It wasn't the cartoon of old men with ear trumpets. Although yes, there was an old man with an ear trumpet. But it wasn't Downton Abbey and the Roller, none of that. Most of these people had no money. They didn't have the country houses. They were regular people who had regular jobs. They were well informed, and lending their expertise. And the speeches were amazing, so I'm glad that I went.

People who are good at comic improvisation also tend to be musical; I don't know why, but the two talents often go together.

In real life, people fumble their words. They repeat themselves and stare blankly off into space and don't listen properly to what other people are saying. I find that kind of speech fascinating but screenwriters never write dialogue like that because it doesn't look good on the page. It looks like they don't know how to write dialogue.