75 Quotes by Julian Barratt

I ran off stage at my first gig. Halfway through it, I forgot my lines and didn't know what to do, so I just ran out of the building down towards a lake. I was going to throw myself in, but the compere came out and said, 'No, it's going well, come back and finish the gig!'

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.'

People can see that we are part of a tradition of absurd comedy, stretching from Spike Milligan and Peter Cook through to Monty Python and Vic Reeves. We're not like Ricky Gervais's hyper-real cringe comedy. We're at the other end of the scale, but there's room for the sillier stuff, too.

I find the pressure to be funny when you're being interviewed live - quite intense.

I always dreamt of being in 'Kerrang.' That was my ambition. I read that religiously when I was into heavy metal. Then the jazz magazines took over.

With something that's not based just in comedy, you can be a bit weirder in a slightly realistic way.

Life without music would be a mistake.

I can act with either eye, but you've got to be twice as good as an actor to act with one eye. You need to put all your emotions just through one eye and really punch it out of that eye. I found it quite difficult to do at first, and then I found a technique that allowed me to act with one eye, which I patented.

The profession is rife with fear about your age, about your validly, longevity, appearance. It's vanity, and it's hard to sort of avoid all those things; they come at you as an actor.