"The characters can't be wittier than people are in real life. They have to be character witty."

"I don't want to do the same thing over and over again."

"I'm actually about as famous as a fourth division footballer from the 70s."

"I never thought I want to do anything, really, except not go to work properly and turn up at the same place every day and eat sandwiches in the same canteen, if I can possibly help it, as I don't think I'd be very good at it."

"The trend now is to get away from stage bound sitcoms."

"The truth is that I'm constitutionally incapable of doing an ordinary job."

"I think a lot of the time you just parody yourself."

"I thought The Office was good, though I didn't think of it as a sitcom, just as a very good programme."

"Black Books adheres to a more old fashioned, traditional sitcom format, which I think works, because in its own way, it's quite theatrical."

"I have no qualifications to do anything else and there weren't any formal application forms you had to fill in for stand-up, so I thought I'd give that a twist."

"It's true that I have spoken about doing a book before, but then everyone you speak to is planning to write a book."

"You try various things when you're growing up. I was an attache in the Foreign Service for a while and then I drove a bulldozer, but neither of those panned out for me so it had to be stand-up."

"We are both drawn to surreal situations so the writing was a joy."

"One thing that's coming up a lot is: are you as grumpy as you appear from this Black Books thing."

"Yeah, I think Michael has had to deal with that label of being Michael Caine for a long time."

"You achieve the surreal jokes through the realism by making it elastic."

"I don't really think of myself as an actor."

"I think that women just have a primeval instinct to make soup, which they will try to foist on anybody who looks like a likely candidate."