Quotes from Julian Barratt

This business is ephemeral, and you have to maintain a healthy cynicism about it. There's a 'flavour of the month' aspect to it, so you have to keep moving on and mutating.

Musicals are just funny to me.

I love 'Airplane,' and I love 'Naked Gun' and all those films, where you're parodying.

Sometimes it takes you two or three seconds to get your head round a joke and laugh at it. With a snot-bubble laugh, it comes instinctively - almost in spite of yourself. It's caused by something silly - like when a little kid says something unexpectedly bizarre.

I did try and do some spooky stand up once, and some of my stand-up had - I tried to do some horror stand-up, but it didn't really work very well.

I thought I could see how standup worked. I never thought of being an actor - or anything else, really - but I thought, 'I can see how you get on stage and tell jokes.'

It's good to give people a jolt. If they're expecting one thing, it's important to give them something else. If you do something startling, audiences might at first freak out, but then they start to think, 'This is not going to be conventional. I'm going to enjoy this.'

When you're really laughing, you feel like a little kid, and nothing matters.

Adapting a book doesn't mean the book stops just because you've made a film out of it.

It's strange, but something about lack of structure needs a structure itself. Otherwise, after a while, it's like looking at a Rothko painting or a Peter Greenaway film. You think, 'OK, I want to see something else now.'

I don't like talking about myself; I'm not good at analysing myself. I don't want to analyse myself.

For me, there's no dichotomy between being shy or a performer, because I think it's more a way of slightly presenting a version of things to the world.

I'm not a natural comic, I don't think. That's why I gave up stand-up. It was hard. It involved a lot of death. Dying. Dying on stage. But it's one of those jobs you can only learn by doing it.

Laughter's good, but it's not love. It's one aspect. One emotion you're eliciting from your audience.

I have trouble keeping a lid on the self-hatred.

We have a need to make people laugh at things they'd never thought about, make them laugh at things that aren't logical.

I want to create a world where all the rules are different. It should be magical to enter.