The path of my life is strewn with cow pats from the devil's own satanic herd!

I like to relish words and sentences, and phraseology, and there's not much facility for that [playing Maigret].

Nope, I don't enjoy work generally. Not because I'm lazy; it's just all so stressful and worrying.

I find his films about as funny as getting an arrow through the neck and discovering there's a gas bill tied to it.

I think you're bound to get a sense of any character that you play. It's not something you often do in comedy.

When you play a serious role, as far as I'm concerned, I feel I'm using exactly the same skills, whatever they are, to play the role as you do with something more obviously comic. It's slightly different muscles, but the same skill set.

The Maigret stories are all very different in terms of the content and the way that the stories are told. They're not what I would call formulaic.