Disappointment is an endless wellspring of comedy inspiration.

I've always liked clothes, since I was a kid.

It's always the case, whenever you're doing someone real, how much you want to do an impression or a characterisation. If I was doing Churchill, or Gandhi - people know exactly how they talked, walked.

I like the idea of not everything happening between two human beings to be everyone's property.

I like life to surprise me.

I love watching Billy Bob, just as a punter anyway. I like his work. But working with him is really easy and really straight-forward. He's immediately good. He doesn't have to work up to it. He doesn't make your life difficult. He listens. He's a very good listener, in terms of his acting.

Like any friendship or marriage, familiarity breeds more contempt, and love, and everything.

The design of 'Love Actually,' the typeface, the basic line of that poster and that DVD cover has been ripped off so many times.

I always kind of think if The Beatles were still around now, people would've lost interest quite a long time ago. Seven years of recording - it's there forever. I think not outstaying your welcome is a vital ingredient.

If everyone's just saying what they feel and doing whatever they want, there's no drama in the world. And there's also no truth to it, 'cause that's just not the truth.

My first engagement with any art was music.

When people bully us, we are complicit in it in some way. We do allow it to happen to some extent.

There are lots of things that keep me awake at night, but work isn't one of them. I mean, no-one's going to die if someone doesn't like what I do. So I don't feel a great pressure.

Organised religion, organised anything, requires commitment and requires an engagement with something. A lot of the time, we don't want to commit.

I did a play once where a reviewer said, 'Martin Freeman's too nice to play a bad guy.' And I thought: 'Well, bad guys aren't always bad guys, you know?' When I see someone play the obvious villain, I know it's false.

I've got a pretty good musical ear, and I can pick things up.

I don't like 'cool telly.'

If it were purely up to me, my kids would probably be vegetarian Catholic Marxists.

I wanted to be an actor because I saw 'Dog Day Afternoon,' you know what I mean?

I don't have sentimental attachments to characters at all.

In London we give ourselves a pat on the back, rightly, for not killing one another, for our prejudice being subtle rather than lethal.

I like the quiet life sometimes. I also love a bustling press conference sometimes as well. I love a 600 metre red carpet.

Name anything - high-definition TV, computer obsolescence - and I'm pretty much annoyed by it.

I'm just a sucker for a good script.

There are about 20 people in my life that I want to love me, and none of them are the 'Daily Mail.'

I'm not particularly affable in real life, I have to tell you. I've got that side to me, of course, but that's not all I am.

I can live without endless television programmes and films just centered around computers. I can sort of live without that.

'The Hobbit' would have been very difficult to pass on, do you know what I mean? It's not the kind of ship that comes into dock very often.

Being an actor is just like being any other sort of self-employed person - we're all just happy to have a job in the first place, but we also thrive off the uncertainty of it.

My main priority in any job is when is the soonest I can get back to the three people I love most in the world.

We can all look on the Internet and go, 'He hates me! Oh, but she loves me. Oh, but he hates me,' you know. And that way, madness lies.