Ricky Gervais

“There are no Hollywood stars speaking out for the elderly. They're forgotten, bewildered, and I don't think it's because people are cruel or don't care. It's because you don't want to think about your own mortality. I think people don't talk about it enough.”

“Honor is a gift a man gives himself. You can be as good as anyone that ever lived. If you can read, you can learn everything that anyone ever learned. But you've got to want it.”

“The great thing about being an artist is, we want our work to be seen.”

“Where there's a will - there's a relative!”

“The second series is always my favourite as a writer/director; you can hit the ground running... so that's fun.”

“I stand by 'I'm not going to do 'The Office' again.' That would be weird: all the same people sitting at the same desks at a paper merchant's in Slough.”

“All of my friends are oddities.”

“… Science is constantly proved all the time. You see, if we take something like any fiction, any holy book… and destroyed it, in a thousand years’ time, that wouldn’t come back just as it was. Whereas if we took every science book, and every fact, and destroyed them all, in a thousand years they’d all be back, because all the same tests would [produce] the same result.”

“I think you can make fun of anything except things people can't help. They can't help their race or their sex or their age, so you ridicule their pretension or their ego instead. You can ridicule ideas - ideas don't have feelings. You can ridicule an idea that someone holds without hurting them.”

“Ego is hilarious - especially the vanity of a comedian. As soon as you see one start worrying about how cool he is or about how many stadiums he can fill, he stops being funny.”

“Your reputation is still the most important thing that you've got.”

“With the Internet era and social media and politics being so out there with the lies, now you've got people denying things they're on camera doing, and then you've got people not really caring about the truth. You've got people supporting people who've done horrific things, but just don't want the other side to get any satisfaction.”

“I do the Golden Globes because they say I can say what I want. I wouldn't have that at the Oscars.”

“I don't believe in ghosts or ESP or elves... or God. But I am spiritual in the sense that I get a lump in my throat when I listen to Vaughan Williams.”

“I wanted to be clever, but being funny came first. That's how you know someone is clever. They don't come out and tell you pi to 13 places - they tell you a joke.”

“A couple of people I knew went to university apart from me, but all the way through I was the smartest kid in the school. That's luck, but I was proud of it. And I was also proud of doing well without trying. As you get older, and it took me a long time to realise it, that's a disgusting attitude, revolting.”

“I'm a fan of the kind of political correctness that is about not promoting prejudice. But some people in America are offended by equality because when you've had privilege for so long, equality feels like oppression.”

“Free speech is one of the most important things to me, but I think it gets confusing when it comes to offense. Because for one, just because you have the right to say anything, it doesn't mean you have to.”

“Even I can't talk about myself for an hour.”