I'm as poor as a church mouse, that's just had an enormous tax bill on the very day his wife ran off with another mouse, taking all the cheese.

I'm not a naturally funny man. I find that I can only be funny, if I become someone else.

Paris in the mid-'50s was a very interesting place. It was only ten years after the Third Reich had left, and the city was awash with guns, and crime, and racketeering, and all sorts of hangovers from a very difficult time in French history. So it's an interesting time to be a policeman.

The clear problem of the outlawing of insult is that too many things can be interpreted as such. Criticism, ridicule, sarcasm, merely stating an alternative point of view to the orthodoxy, can be interpreted as insult.

I tend to play rather odd men. People that are slightly odd or eccentric, or have a more particular attitude to life.

[Maigret] is terribly self-contained, not that I would ever wish him to be any more comic, particularly, but in the second film we've made you see he's a little more ironic from time to time. But as I say, that's just work in progress.

What is wrong with inciting intense dislike of a religion if the activities or teachings of that religion are so outrageous, irrational or abusive of human rights that they deserve to be intensely disliked?