I can relate to historical characters or imaginary ones. It doesn't matter if a story takes place in the future or in the present as long as the story is compelling.

There's a wealth of literature out there which hopefully will be you know exploded in the future and I personally find it very rewarding to be involved with classic storytelling and sort of legendary characters.

I'm good at coming up with wacky characters and funny dialogue.

I tend to play characters that I can infuse with certain kinds of humour. Even the baddest guy can be funny in his own particular way. I want the audience to engage with the character on some deeper level so that they leave the cinema still thinking about him.

I would call it a comedy variety show. We have some people just doing straight standup. We usually try to have one musical act of sort. So its just people being funny in different ways not just sketch not just standup not just characters all of those things.

Sometimes comics will make the observation that it's not jokes that are funny it's characters that are funny. And isn't that true! That's why I always kill jokes. I'm terrible at them because I get the joke right but I can't get the character right and it just goes down like a lead balloon.

I've never really understood that. It's a funny thing people sometimes accuse us of condescending to our characters somehow-that to me is kind of inexplicable.

It's a funny show. The characters are surprisingly likable given how ugly they are. We've got this huge cast of characters that we can move around. And over the last few seasons we've explored some of the secondary characters' personal lives a bit more.

It used to be that you had to make female TV characters perfect so no one would be offended by your 'portrayal' of women. Even when I started out on 'The Office' eight years ago we could write our male characters funny and flawed but not the women. And now thankfully it's completely different.

When I was a little kid I wrote this play about all these characters living in a haunted house. There was a witch who lived there and a mummy. When they were all hassling him this guy who bought the house - I can't believe I remember this - he said to them 'Who's paying the mortgage on this haunted house?' I thought that was really funny.

I think romance is friendship and attraction sort of meeting together and that does influence what I'm writing a lot. I try to establish the attraction obviously but I also think it's important to show the characters having actual conversations about things other than their feelings for each other - and to develop their friendship on the page.

006 was such an interesting character and the film really explored his friendship with Bond and how it all went wrong so it was a very personal journey for both characters.

All the characters in my films are fighting these problems needing freedom trying to find a way to cut themselves loose but failing to rid themselves of conscience a sense of sin the whole bag of tricks.

I like repressed characters. That gives me a lot of freedom to make a lot of different choices through subtleties.

I've been very lucky in the characters I've chosen. Up until last year I was a nobody. I did jobs I booked because I needed to put food in my mouth.

My greatest fear is feeling like a professional novelist. Somebody who creates characters who sits down and has pieces of paper taped to the wall - what's going to happen in this scene or this act. What I like is for it to be a much more scary sloppy reflection of who I am.

Normally I name my characters after famous comedians.

None of my characters are rich or famous and the situations they find themselves in could happen to anyone.

I'm not comfortable being around too many people. I don't like being out in public too much. I don't like going to bars. I don't like doing celebrity stuff. So most of the characters I play are people who don't always feel comfortable beyond their small circle of friends.

I don't want to be reincarnated that's for sure. When you've had rewarding experiences in your life - a loving family friends - you don't need additional reassurances that you're going to do something with a new cast of characters. I'd just as soon pass.

There is a common theme though in the stories I have told which are usually associations of characters or families that are formed outside of a family circle.

For my own family I would always choose the makeshift surrogate family formed by various characters unrelated by blood.

My family and our neighbors and friends thought of Africa and its Africans as extensions of the stereotyped characters that we saw in movies and on television in films such as 'Tarzan' and in programs such as 'Ramar of the Jungle' and 'Sheena Queen of the Jungle.'

Because I didn't have brothers I was always interested in the kids down the street that had four brothers in their family so I became one of them - but it was not my family. I've always been attracted to temporary families. They tend to be lost characters.