My school days were the happiest days of my life; which should give you some indication of the misery I've endured over the past twenty-five years.

My school days were the happiest days of my life; which should give you some indication of the misery I've endured over the past twenty-five years.

I'm always amazed to hear of air crash victims so badly mutilated that they have to be identified by their dental records. What I can't understand is, if they don't know who you are, how do they know who your dentist is?

On my first day in New York a guy asked me if I knew where Central Park was. When I told him I didn't he said, 'Do you mind if I mug you here?'.

All disc jockeys are without talent. Noel Edmonds - I can't stand Noel Edmonds.

Am I allowed to call myself working-class now? Because obviously I'm now very rich.

And like the old stereotype, I overcame my shyness by making my friends laugh.

At one point in the mid-Eighties I shared a promoter with the Smiths. One night, we were sitting backstage when Morrissey burst in, utterly distraught, sobbing his heart out. Turns out someone had thrown a sausage at him on stage during 'Meat Is Murder.'

Beginning with a trip out to Ellis Island, I saw for myself where thousands of European immigrants took their first steps onto American soil, bringing with them nothing but their ambition: people such as Erich von Stroheim and Adolph Zukor.

Generally speaking, politicians are an odd bunch. They seem to have very thick skins and genuinely don't care what people think. And charm is a very important part of the politician's armoury. I try to resist that kind of charm.

I don't always vote in general elections, but I think I've always voted Labour.

I looked at longevity in show business when I was about 13, and the people who seemed to have longevity were the ones who'd spent quite a bit of time learning about what they were doing before they made it.

I really don't take any interest at all in contemporary comedy.

I remember being fascinated by the very nature of comedy from the age of 10; why is this funny, and that isn't?

I think having an outsider's viewpoint is interesting and good, especially for a comedian.

I was trying to organise my DVDs into a sort of chronological order, and I am afraid that it all trailed off after the Sixties.

I've never been disappointed by politicians. I've never invested that much in them in the first place.

In 1986, I was attacked in the street as I helped Neil Mullarkey from the Comedy Store Players to put up posters. We were in the wrong place at the wrong time - midnight - and we were English. I got kicked in the head.

In 1987, I was in Edinburgh doing my first one-man show. I took part in a kickabout with some fellow comedians and tripped over my trousers and heard this cracking sound in my leg. A couple of days later I went into a coma and was diagnosed with a pulmonary embolism.

In fact, I don't watch a lot of contemporary comedy for fear of being influenced by it.

Maybe there's a perception of me as grumpy old bugger who suffers from depression. It's a total misconception. I don't think of myself as any grumpier than the next person. I'm not even grumpy first thing in the morning.

The thing about improvisation is that it's not about what you say. It's listening to what other people say. It's about what you hear.

Well, sanity, I suppose, is getting people to see the world your way.

When I turned about 12 or 13, I realised that being funny wasn't about remembering jokes. It was about creating them.

When I used to do the Edinburgh Festival, there was a bunch of guys selling fresh oysters and I'd eat ten daily - marvellous.

When I wake up on a Monday morning and I realise I don't have to go and work at the civil service, I really think I've won.

When I was nine I spent a lot of my time reading books about the history of comedy, or listening to the Goons or Hancock, humour from previous generations.

Roosevelt's magic lay in one facet of his personality: He knew how to take the risk. No other man in public life I knew could so readily take the challenge of the new.

Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a certain poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself. Because it's only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

If it came to saving the life of one priest or sacrificing the life of an entire congregation, the church would save the life of the priest. Which is backwards, of course.

Work is the meat of life, pleasure the dessert.

All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.

At the end, the realization is that she had to get to a place in her life where she could drop her guard and make peace with the fact that whether she had a small amount of time, that she had to kind of live it completely through, instead of living by the rules.

You have choices to make about what you do with the rest of your life.

From the standpoint of observation, then, we must regard it as a highly probable hypothesis that the beginnings of the mental life date from as far back as the beginnings of life at large.

I want to have babies one day but not right now. When I do it I want to do it really well. I want it to be my best project in life.

Any judge who allows an adulterer with a live-in girlfriend to terminate the life of his wife should be impeached.

I can assure you, public service is a stimulating, proud and lively enterprise. It is not just a way of life, it is a way to live fully.

The work which is manipulated looks a little boring to me. I think life is pretty strange anyway. It is wooo, wooo, wooo!

With an eye made quiet by the power of harmony, and the deep power of joy, we see into the life of things.

This isn't life in the fast lane, it's life in the oncoming traffic.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.

Sometimes life's so much cooler when you just don't know any better and all the painful lessons have not hammered your head open yet.

My life is so full of surprises, nothing surprises me any more.

I love children and I love men, but I can't commit to either for the rest of my life.

Pop music, disco music, and heavy metal music is about shutting out the tensions of life, putting it away.

Yes, I am Algerian of Moroccan origin through my parents, but all my life is Algeria. I was born there.

At one point in your life, you'll have the thing you want or the reasons why you don't.