Alexei Sayle

“As a comic, you try something and if it works you go with it and grind it to death.”

“People aren't universally heroic.”

“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.'”

“For me, the showbiz memoir is uninteresting - you want to tell people something they don't know about.”

“Pete couldn't believe how sanctimonious somebody could be just because they'd once had a soldering iron stuck up their arse.”

“If sitcoms were easy to write, there'd be a lot of good ones, and there aren't.”

“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?”

“I like the south of Spain, notably for the Moorish influence and the weather.”

“I don't think I'd ever get thin, but I don't see why I should necessarily think that I couldn't... You can't live your life for your routines.”

“Everyone I used to work with is still alive and can afford expensive lawyers.”

“I'm sure a psychologist would see something highly significant in how absent-minded I am. I mean I'd forget my head if it wasn't attached to my neck by muscles, ligaments and my esophagus.”

“Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, may have had his charms, but he really couldn't be considered hip.”

“I'm still fiercely ambitious.”

“I don't think people were that interested in what I was doing for the most of the 1990s.”

“If someone starts agreeing with me, I don't like it. Out of pique, I become something else.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Despite its flaws, Marxism still seems to explain the material world better than anything else.”

“I always thought communism was crap, really.”

“I've been going to Granada for many years and 12 years ago bought a house a few miles outside the city.”