Best quotes by Richard Ayoade

I think there's nothing worse than telling actors what to do in front of everyone, because then on the next take, everyone's waiting to see if you do that ... Everyone watches. It's just the worst thing.

I'm pretty bad at seeing new films.

As in, I think 'Badlands' is one of the funniest films of all time: "Every day I wish I was carried off to a magical land, but that never happened" is one of the funniest lines in any film.

American television is very much created by the writers, just the volume of it. The writers are so key. You're just trying to do something that serves that script. And in general, film isn't all about the script, really.

I only ever privately tell people stuff for the scene. And I often ask what they feel is right. Normally, by the time that we're filming, if it doesn't work, it always the script.

With a live performance, you feel nervous because there's a sense it could do well or badly based on how well you are performing, whereas the only variable with a film premiere is technical, which invariably you have very little control over, whether the sound is good, whether the acoustics of the room are good.

The most interesting part of filming is what the actors do. That's the primary link between the story and the audience.

I've always felt that actors in my experience have a very good and accurate instinct about whether something feels right or not. They just have a sense because they have to literally do it.

Cars are good for entrances and exits. And there is something about driving that is quite cliched in a funny way. I like Roy Orbison's video for I Drove All Night because it's so literal. It is just a man driving throughout the night. I like that silliness. To be in a video is a ridiculous thing. It's almost impossible to do it without any humour.

To be in a video is a ridiculous thing. It's almost impossible to do it without any humour

No. I really don't think I'm cool. I'm not.

When I do plays in New York and do eight shows a week, you have the same feeling. Three of them are terrible, four of them are okay and one is really good. It's hard to say what accounts for the really good one or for the terrible ones, but you end up trying to remanufacture whatever worked for the good one, like eating a tomato. I ate a tomato and the show was good, but that of course is not how it works.

A writer/director is a tough thing to gauge when someone hasn't directed a movie before. You just don't know. Sometimes it will be a great script that's written beautifully, and then the director who has also written it does not have the facility to translate it.

A lot of comedies are based on the reaction shot. You have one person doing something stupid and one person is generally the straight man, and the laughs generally come on the reaction of the straight man to the funny thing the other person has done.

The act of seeing any film generally is you knowing more than the characters, even if its the classic Hitchcock shot of two people talking and a bomb being under the table. Part of the pleasure of it is seeing where people go wrong, and the irony of situations.

I'm not a terribly social person, and so I have to really like people to work with them.

I think people have the capacity to be many different things and many seemingly contradictory behaviors.

I try to write every day. Sometimes the things come out well, and sometimes they don't. When they come out well you think, Wow, I must be really great; and when they come out poorly, you think you must be terrible, but the truth is that's how any process works.

Why have a pet hate? Why should it be confined? My hate is both wide ranging and total.

I'm just terrible. At talking. With words.