- At least Thatcher was insane. I think that Blair's insane and sanctimonious.
- It's a quieter life than being on the telly but no one's been snide in their book reviews like people can be in TV reviews. I'm an intellectual. I'd have been given a medal in France. It's still a struggle here. People used to think I was just a shouty comic but I was doing stuff about Sartre [Jean-Paul Sartre].
- It seems easier to make a career out of comedy now than it was in the 1980s. 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.
- I did six series for the BBC and that was enough. I've been writing for ten years, which is more challenging artistically.
- Everyone I used to work with is still alive and can afford expensive lawyers. For me, the showbiz memoir is uninteresting - you want to tell people something they don't know about.
- [on Ben Elton] We all felt with Ben that what motivated him primarily was popularity and power. But the problem with pursuing that popularity, I think, for him, is that it can never make you happy.
- Israel is the Jimmy Savile of nation states. It clearly doesn't care about damaging the lives of children.
- I like a laugh.
- To be a successful comedy writer you have to have a continually fertile imagination, that's what stops you from being a here today, Bros tomorrow, flash in the pan. Unfortunately, imagination is not something that you can turn on and off like a tap. Nor is it something that you can direct with pinpoint accuracy, unlike 12% of the missiles produced by the British Aerospace Industry. No, the same powers of imagination that make you think up exquisite jests and apposite drolleries are exactly the same powers of imagination that make you think that a dollop of egg mayonnaise left over from lunch that has fallen on your arm is in fact skin cancer. The same qualities of invention which help one to create this hilarious comedy are the same qualities of invention that induce in me the paranoid feeling that my pets are conspiring against me. In fact, I know they are because whenever I come in the room, they stop talking...
- Recently one of my friends decided to become a psychotherapist, so we all rallied round to help. We all went mad.
- [on Sting] He said to me, "You're really funny, aren't you?" And I said, "Yeah".
- I'm in that situation where music's left me. Once they stopped selling CDs I gave up really. I don't know how to download really.
- [on "Blue" by Joni Mitchell] That album is just pure poetry really.
- In 1985, I guest-starred in the two-parter "Revelation of the Daleks" [Revelation of the Daleks: Part One (1985)]. Coincidentally - or not - this was in the period considered by many to be its lowest point. A year later when my Doctor, Colin Baker, left I made a clumsy attempt to replace him. The Sun actually ran a story announcing that I was to be the new Doctor: "It's time for a socialist in the TARDIS," I was quoted as saying. Sadly the BBC didn't agree.
- One of the few things Top Gear (2002) was never accused of was being insufficiently Marxist.
- [on Margaret Thatcher] She's just a sad old lady who's died. I won't be celebrating really. I've got no affection for her. She was a vindictive, mean and petty-minded person and I think we're seeing in the language coming from the Tories now that vindictiveness and meanness is still prevalent. But her power also came as a result of the profound failure in the old-fashioned authoritarian left. There's a degree of show-business about politics and to elect someone like Michael Foot was insane. Even Neil Kinnock was a pretty unattractive person. Scargill [trade union leader Arthur Scargill] was an utterly incompetent leader.
- Cacking up your own house is a British Obsession.
- We're like a really great disease. We're like the Jehovah's Witnesses of the Universe. There is Life out there, but it's hiding, because they don't want to meet us.
- It was when I heard The Goons that I realised Comedy didn't have to be funny. It could be more like jazz: a load of wank.
- Every time someone goes mad in Britain, the Freud Family gets 5p.
- I learned the lesson that, even after the revolution, cool, handsome and confident is always going to beat weird-looking and needy
- Also a fan of being inscrutable, Franco once said, 'You are a the slave of what you say and the master of what you don't say.' He might have added that that approach isn't always guaranteed to work. If you attempt, for example, to be sphinx-like, mysterious and enigmatic when you get to the front of a long queue at the chip shop, you do risk being punched quite hard in the back of the head.
- Because Capitalism has won the battle of competing economic systems, we never really question it's nature. Now in many ways it's a wonderful thing. Nanotechnology, reasonably priced socks, and Ed Sheeran. Wow, it's amazing. The only problem is it depends on constant endlessly expanding consumption, and that's destroying the planet. There are efforts to ameliorate defects, windpower, recycling, but as a child of left wing parents I know an empty gesture when I see one! One has a feeling, born out of experience, that things are better run in Europe than they are here, the roads are better, the trains aren't run on some nightmarish scheme devised by Hieronymous Bosch PLC, food is better and healthier, government at local and state level seems to have more sense and competence. The reason for this, perhaps more than every other: every nation in Europe lost the War. Either they were defeated by the Allies like Germany and Italy, or they were defeated and invaded by the Germans. One way or another this defeat led to them getting a Fresh Start, a catastrophe on such a scale inevitably led to these countries having to reassess all their government structures and ways of doing things, from top to bottom a clean sweep introducing a new mode of things not affected by attitudes unchanged since the 19th Century. Those structures and individuals that had brought their countries to defeat were removed and replaced with more efficient ones. Whereas in Britain, because we won, we were left with the sense that the way we did things, ran our factories and cities, managed our Health Service, was with all its snobberies, massive inefficiencies and sheer stupidness, was the correct way to do this. Who won the War in Europe? Us and Russia, says it all. If we ever want to experience happiness and prosperity, what we need to do is lose a War to somebody. And quick.
- Being an only child was like taking an extraordinarily long train trip. You had to keep finding ways to pass the time.
- I found working in an office that a tribal mentality developed where no-one cared how they behaved.
- I always seem to want the ones who don't want me. Like Archbishop Desmond Tutu. He said we could be friends and go rollerskating.
- I think it's wonderful to have a band like Dire Straits in the world. No, I do, because you say to somebody "do you like Dire Straits?", and if they say "yeah, I think they're really great", then you know that they're a stupid git and they want their head shutting in a door.
- Ah, John, he's the intelligent one. He's in the Police Force.
- People are more violently opposed to fur than leather because it's safer to harass rich women than motorcycle gangs
- [Dogcatcher Compilation] There can be no Alienation, and therefore no Mental Illness, in the Soviet Union.
- Successful writers aren't inventive at all. They just have really interesting friends!
- I come across as a real nutcase on this show, but it's all illusion. But when I was at school, I was friends with some real nutcases, some real psychos. And you have to be really careful what you complain about, because real psychos, if they like you, are always doing little favours for you, then coming up to you saying "That problem you had with the School Hamster? It's been sorted! There's a new Furry Kebab down the Chip Shop..." [mimes a hamster dying on a rotisserie]
- What have I been doing between series? Well, I've been doing a lot of staring off into the middle distance, rocking backwards and forwards while humming.
- When I was young, I was very heavily into drug abuse. I used to run into Boots and shout insults at bottles of paracetamol.
- My parents were both Communists, and they told me that religion was the opium of the people. Which made opium a bit of a surprise when I tried it!
- [Thatcher] had a Messianic sense of her own rightness.
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