"Americans have different ways of saying things. They say 'elevator', we say 'lift'... they say 'President', we say 'stupid psychopathic git."
"Dire Straits is a great band. Someone tells you they like 'Brothers in Arms' and immediately you know they're a stupid annoying git."
"People are more violently opposed to fur than leather because it's safer to harass rich women than motorcycle gangs."
"Recently, my personal advisors have been telling me to go to America. Actually, people have been walking up to me in the street and telling me to sod off, but that's the same thing, isn't it?"
"If you travel to the States... they have a lot of different words than like what we use. For instance: they say 'elevator', we say 'lift'; they say 'drapes', we say 'curtains'; they say 'president', we say 'seriously deranged git.'"
"I'm an intellectual."
"Now, as a comic, if you're vaguely amusing you can go straight into TV, then you play the O2 and then everyone's sick of you."
"People used to think I was just a shouty comic but I was doing stuff about Sartre."
"The journalists have obviously failed to capture my innate magnetism, humour and charisma, and they all need to be fired from their newspapers right away."
"I wanted to write about how people's beliefs shift."
"Most of my friends are women - I quite fancied being a woman in a way."
"I am quite girly."
"It always seemed to be a constant that my parents were political."
"People aren't universally heroic."
"I'm distinct, really."
"I think that my ideas of the world are that it's random and cruel but kind of quite comical really, and therefore the humour, in a sense, springs from that."
"As a comic, you try something and if it works you go with it and grind it to death."
"You can't do comedy with a beard."
"If sitcoms were easy to write, there'd be a lot of good ones, and there aren't."
"I suppose the common idea of me is that I'm going to be someone who's hyper and cracking jokes all the time, but people who meet me are soon disabused of that notion."
"If I won the lottery I'd start a charity that helped little family hardware stores, cobblers and fruit shops open in city centres."
"I liked 35 and in both my novels that is the age of the lead characters. I tried making them my age but they just seemed to keep moaning about stuff."
"I would say I was still a Marxist - which is not to be confused with being a Communist. Despite its flaws, Marxism still seems to explain the material world better than anything else."
"Most of the Communists I knew were nice people."
"But as in all cults, what's central to the Communist Party is the belief system and the elimination of nuance. From there you're very slowly led down the road to fanaticism and mass murder."
