Maureen Lipman

“I've done at least 22 West End shows and each of those takes up nine months of the year.”

“There are experts in every field without a clue of what they are supposed to be good at. Plumbers and doctors and car mechanics and, I suppose, actors and certainly directors.”

“I haven't done any elective surgery. I've nothing against it, although I would not touch Botox, because I know an actress who almost died when it went into a nerve instead of the skin.”

“I inadvertently lobbed a boiled potato across the room at a palace lunch.”

“The film industry has eaten up the TV writers. And TV, which always used to steal from theatre - now it's taking everything from radio.”

“I've always found it very hard to play the pupil game, as I call it. The one where the middle-aged actress puts her hand up and says to the director, 'Please sir, is it all right if I move over here?'”

“It is an acknowledged fact that a woman who has visited Newcastle, Malvern, Glasgow and Bath in the space of four weeks must be in awe of stone masons. Never was there seen such magnificent perspective, such carved and curlicued splendour. All this, plus surrounding hills and shopping.”

“Traffic-calming areas work because they assume courtesy, not bad manners.”

“I know there's a lot of misery out there, but I feel content.”

“It's very hard to quantify me.”

“I have actor's dreams where I am opening a play and know neither the lines nor the story.”

“It's a bit like laughter in church, something has to be forbidden to make you really laugh, to make you really belly laugh. It's when you shouldn't be laughing. And so, therefore, all the things that are being cancelled out are, I'm afraid, the things that have always made people laugh.”

“You're not going to appeal to everyone and you can't be too precious about that.”

“In the 1960s, if you were, like me, green and from Hull, you had to keep up with your peer group in London.”

“Like everything, save poaching eggs and flamenco, learning gets harder as one gets older.”

“I love my Jewishness.”

“When I was 71, I did panto in Richmond, flashing my legs and thinking nothing of it. So I'll keep working for as long as I've got my health.”

“It used to be that I couldn't go into a restaurant without someone making phone noises at me. I'm sure when I die it'll be the headline - 'Lipman Cut Off!' or 'Receiver Is Finally Put Down On Jewish Comedienne.'”

“Radio 4 goes on the minute I wake up.”

“I have decent hair; it's one of the few things I like about me.”