David Baddiel

“I always think of Ireland as a place for complex ideas and prose. I like Irishness. I like Irish culture and Irish literature.”

“I tend to feed the trolls because it gives me material for my work. I'm sometimes taken aback by the racist and antisemitic abuse I get, but most of the time I'll get angry for a second, and then remind myself, 'This is material.' The trick is not to be too reactive.”

“When I was growing up I don't think Muslims and Jews were considered to be opposites.”

“I don't think comedians are better travellers but they are communicators and storytellers.”

“I don't want to be one of those old people getting up at 5 A.M. to potter.”

“With the Kick It Out campaign, I was interested in asking: 'Why is antisemitism a lesser racism than other racisms?' I genuinely believe that to be the case - that negative stuff said against Jews isn't considered that important.”

“I thought I was great at football. For a long time I thought I could have been a professional if I'd wanted to.”

“There are no gatekeepers in children's literature. There are children who like what you write because it's funny.”

“I might be the most unpractical person in the world.”

“The first proper car I had was an old Nissan Micra.”

“I went to a Jewish primary school and all my parents' friends were Jewish.”

“Fame is a silly thing that makes your life absurd.”

“I spent a long time on a big studio sitcom, 'Baddiel's Syndrome,' for Sky, and got no audience.”

“I hate predicting football scores that mean a lot to me, because even though I'm an absolute materialist and don't believe in anything superstitious, I get superstitious.”

“Neurosis, an obsession with stupidly named food, bookishness - these are all OK to class as attributes that come hand in hand with a name that ends in 'berg'; the only possible exception being the money thing, although clearly we are better at accountancy.”

“I'm not saying Jews should only play Jews... I personally think actors should be allowed to act.”

“Comedy is a difficult thing for a critic, as, unlike all other art-forms, it has an inbuilt success-o-meter: laughter. Therefore, there's no real need for critics.”

“When you get older, you are told constantly that you should be there for your parents' deaths, otherwise you will regret it. But what we are not prepared for is a sudden, brutal death that you are there for, with medical people shouting and things bleeping and your parent gasping for breath.”

“My dad has dementia, so I monitor my own memory in a way that other people may not. As an atheist, I don't believe in an afterlife so I feel I need to fit in as much as I can while I'm here.”

“My father worked for Unilever, running a mass-spectrometry lab - mass spectrometry is a process for elucidating the chemical structures of molecules, which means that he presided over a legal form of corporate espionage, breaking down the component parts of competitors' products in order to copy them.”