Marcus Brigstocke

“I rarely fly, for environmental reasons more than anything else.”

“Guilt is feeling bad about what you have done; shame is feeling bad about who you are - all it is, is muddling up things you have done with who you are.”

“If you want something Scottish, go get yourself a kilt.”

“I don't mind not being cool; I wear a cardigan.”

“Catholicism has the clerical equivalent to a nut allergy - even a small exposure to change, and the whole thing will go into anaphylactic shock.”

“I'm more pompous and self-assured and determined that if - you know - if the truth can be told so as to be understood, it will be believed.”

“If you go on stage with an agenda, you have to accept not everyone's going to agree with it.”

“I have an addictive personality. Boarding school merely sent me more quickly on the downward spiral that dominated my childhood.”

“No one wants life to end. It was bad enough when my last tour came to an end.”

“I'd rather be happy than right.”

“There are a lot of comics at the top end making staggering amounts of money and selling out stadiums. I think stand-up is a more intimate thing than that. Maybe because of the kind of comedy I do. It's like a discussion, but I'm the one with the microphone.”

“I've spent a lot of very happy times in Edinburgh as a result of playing virtually every festival since 1996. It's also a beautiful city in its own right, is walkable, within sight of the sea and mountains - and was too far north for the Luftwaffe to have done any damage, hence the spectacularly beautiful architecture.”

“All my shows are therapy, trying to navigate interesting subjects so I can work them out and to be honest and say some things are beyond the wit of this man.”

“And much as I enjoy writing and creating stuff, I don't enjoy it so much that I am willing to give up any time that could otherwise be spent performing.”

“I failed to get into drama school, and my best friend told me I should do stand-up instead. I was always doing gags and voices, so he booked a gig for me without telling me. I only had four days to write it. I did a seven-minute set; the first four minutes were terrible, but the last two were amazing.”

“I realised that to compare your insides with other people's outsides leads to unhappiness.”

“I have a very good memory for scripts. I can watch a show I like once, then remember about 90% of the script. But ask me who was in it, and I wouldn't have a clue.”

“I'd lie in bed in my dormitory and grab at bits of my body, wanting to tear them off... I was so large by then that, in the heat, my thighs chafed together and bled. I was very unhappy, and yet no one ever asked me how I felt.”