I've become a professional failure - in order to pay the mortgage I have to remain unemployed. Luckily, a disaster always seems to befall me at exactly the right moment.

I don't have a fear factor. Well, not much of one. And I'm willing to risk quite a lot - as a comedian, you're always risking a lot. You're risking failure, especially if you're improvising and going on TV shows trying to make comedy out of thin air. That is quite a risky business.

Failure? Scared to death of it.

There comes a point in your moviegoing life where you look at the screen and then you look at the world and you ask, 'What is going on?' You want the movies to show you the chaos and mess and risk and failure that are normal for a lot of us. Generally, the movies hide all of that.

I've learned to think in terms of having a long career. Actors can have very long careers that last until the day we die, but there will be moments when you'll feel like you're a failure or when you're disappointed in yourself.

Failure, it is thought, is what sells, and what people want to hear and read about. I am not so sure.

I feel, in the end, as if everything I've done has been a failure.

One must never assume that a character is sympathetic because of either the actor playing them or the fact that they're a lead. I think that's a recipe for failure, actually, because if they become unsympathetic, you lose your audience.

If you're a doctor or a lawyer or teacher, if you only get three things right out of 10, you're considered a failure.

We now live in a world where the only thing to have is success, but failure is marvelous. It's fertiliser, it's like living fertiliser, because you're forced on yourself.

I wish I had been more prepared, both for success and for failure, when I was younger.

But I look at failure as education. In that respect, I am so well-educated.

You get so afraid of failure and so afraid of losing and so afraid of not being the best that it's not a natural drive - it's born out of fear of failure. Which helps in Hollywood.

We feel a lot of pressure about looking silly or appearing weak, whatever that means, or being a failure. You have to keep in your head: what's the worst that can happen?

As soon as I did my first five minutes of stand-up I knew that I would rather be a failure at comedy than a success in marketing.

I mean, I love L.A. - I love living here. But I wish that we could make things without the need to hit a home run every single time. It's a unique thing to Hollywood that if you don't do that every time, then you're considered a failure. But it's like, 'Well, are you making movies to be successful? Or are you making movies to learn something?'

As long as the G.O.P., led by its increasingly visible women, continues to insist that the problem is not their policies but women's failure to understand their own lives and interests, the gender gap won't go away.

My films seem to be about men's struggle with failure.

Schools don't really allow failure and yet it's a valid part of any endeavour, not just writing.

In Britain, by contrast, we still think that class plays a part in determining a person's life chances, so we're less inclined to celebrate success and less inclined to condemn failure. The upshot is that it's much easier to be a failure in Britain than it is in America.

The difference between a beautifully made failure and a beautifully made hit is who you've got playing the leads.

Divorce is so common and accepted in America that beating myself up over it may sound ridiculous. But I was raised to believe that divorce wasn't an option; to me, divorce equaled failure. I wasn't able to change that equation until I found myself in the right relationship.

I've had great success and I've had catastrophic failure. It's really how you handle the rough stuff that defines you, I think.

The biggest problem in my life is trying to be the kind of man that I want to be, the father that I want to be, and how to process the failure of my marriage.