Rowan Atkinson Quotes

The nice thing about your police procedural as opposed to your classic murder mystery is that in a murder mystery you don't know who did it. Whereas in a police procedural you know, you know everything often and you're watching the police home in.

The interesting thing is that everyone in golf is just nice. You learn a lot about people playing golf: their integrity, how they play under pressure.

The detective novel is the art-for-art's-sake of our yawning Philistinism, the classic example of a specialized form of art removed from contact with the life it pretends to build on.

I finally got around to reading the dictionary. Turns out the Zebra did it.

It's nice to be playing a character who's never had a live-action version before.

Certainly in the second film [Maigret's Dead Man], which is quite a more unpleasant and darker story, it's quite different in tone and feel.

I have a big, long episode [in Full Circle] with Calista [Flockhart], and then my character actually carries out through a lot of it because he was a cop investigating this crime. But it is almost hard to remember, even though it wasn't that long ago. We shot it so fast. We literally shot that whole episode in one day.

Where there's a will there's a detective story.

I like that whole cop-comedy type of drama.

The cliches are that it's the most generic Starsky and Hutch plot you can find.

What the detective story is about is not murder but the restoration of order.

A conventional crime story is simple - it's just a corpse in the river or something, and a detective with an alcohol problem.

You can't beat a cop drama. That's what everybody seems to want to watch.

I don't think I'd seen anything like 'The Killing.'

Mysteries include so many things: the noir novel, espionage novel, private eye novels, thrillers, police procedurals. But the pure detective story is where there's a detective and a criminal who's committed a murder and leaves clues for the detective and the careful reader to find.

'Law & Order' is a dream come true. I grew up watching it! I always wanted to portray a character on the show because it's always so riveting.

For something like 'Line of Duty' to work, it has to be both plausible and unexpected.

I've been in an Agatha Christie called 'The Sittaford Mystery,' which I enjoyed, but 'The Pale Horse' has a real sense of intrigue and the jigsaw pieces fitting together.

I've always really liked murder mysteries and thrillers, and great to be able to be actually part of one.

The two mistakes that come to mind are people who introduce a flood of characters in the first few pages. Where the reader has to stop and get out a flow chart and has to figure out who is who. And you just can't do that - introduce the first four generations of a character's family in the first chapter. You can introduce four or five characters at the most in the first chapter. Another mistake is to use big words that are not normally used in conversation to try to impress folks with your vocabulary.

Bluebeard, who said to Scottland Yard, How do I know how many wives I've killed? I'm not an accountant! Never got a dinner!

When it's asshole-tightening time, that's when you see what people are made of. Or at least what their asshole is made of.

If I'm not a murderer," asked Corny, "how come I keep killing people?

Most obviously it [Doctor Strange] will introduce a new character who will be in play in the universe, but once you have gotten an audience to buy into a new concept then it's fun to keep, to play-off, or spin-off that concept down the line.

People often ask me what happened to my first husband? And I say, I killed him.