John Oliver

“I've said yes to everything that Jon Stewart has asked me to do. That's been a pretty good career decision, I think.”

“A Southern accent is not a club in my bag.”

“Sometimes it's good to remember how bad food can be, so you can enjoy the concept of flavour to the fullest.”

“We invented words; we'll tell you how they're supposed to sound.”

“In improv, the whole thing is that it is a relationship between the two people, as a back and forth. In standup, you don't really want to be listening to what somebody is saying; you want to project your jokes into their face. And that's really not a good instinct with a 'Daily Show' field piece, where it's supposed to be an interview.”

“I think puns are not just the lowest form of wit, but the lowest form of human behavior.”

“I knew I was going to go into the field and make fun of people to their faces. I knew what I was getting into.”

“There is an inherent hope and positive drive to New Yorkers.”

“I wanted to be a soccer player. I knew that couldn't happen.”

“When you're dealing with serious subjects, there is a pressure to be absolutely sure that you know what you're doing.”

“I do one accent - my own. I can make it louder or quieter. That is the sum total of my vocal range. I thought I could do an American accent until I tried it in front of an American - the expression of horror is still burnt onto my retinas.”

“I'm always interested in audience interaction. Not so much aggressive audience interaction - I'm genuinely interested in how people see things.”

“I'm not really much of an actor, so when I started on 'The Daily Show', I was just trying to adopt the faux authority of a newsperson.”

“I'm British; pessimism is my wheelhouse.”

“You can write jokes at any point of the day. Jokes are not that hard to write, or they shouldn't be when it is literally your job.”

“It's a great time to be doing political satire when the world is on a knife edge.”

“You don't really know when stand-up material is TV ready; it's just at what point you're willing to let it go and not work on it anymore. I'm not sure there is a point at which you think: 'And that is finished.'”

“Being a Mets fan is like lending someone a lot of money and you just know that you'll never get paid back.”

“There are so many low points with stand-up. You are perpetually humiliated, so it doesn't really matter anymore. I don't have any dignity left to lose. An audience can't hurt you anymore when you've been completely dismantled.”

“I have occasionally - if ever I do interviews that are difficult or nerve-wracking - I take my wife's dog tags and have them in my pocket because it's a very quick way to realize that what I'm doing is not that important. It's not really worth getting stressed about because it's not, you know, war.”