I'm fascinated by comedy.

I'm still fiercely ambitious.

I've accentuated the look over the years. As a comic, you try something and if it works you go with it and grind it to death.

I've been going to Granada for many years and 12 years ago bought a house a few miles outside the city.

If I won the lottery I'd start a charity that helped little family hardware stores, cobblers and fruit shops open in city centres.

If sitcoms were easy to write, there'd be a lot of good ones, and there aren't.

If someone starts agreeing with me, I don't like it. Out of pique, I become something else.

It always seemed to be a constant that my parents were political.

It seems easier to make a career out of comedy now than it was in the 1980s.

Most of my friends are women - I quite fancied being a woman in a way.

Most of the Communists I knew were nice people.

Now, as a comic, if you're vaguely amusing you can go straight into TV, then you play the O2 and then everyone's sick of you.

People aren't universally heroic.

People used to think I was just a shouty comic but I was doing stuff about Sartre.

The optimum frequency with which comedians should do a series is every year. I do one every three years. My audience is literally dying off.

You can't do comedy with a beard.

Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, may have had his charms, but he really couldn't be considered hip.

A lot of those comics can't hold down relationships and they've got no other life apart from performing. They sleep in their Jags and a lot of them can't even talk. All they can do is tell gags.

However, my problems with my memory are further complicated by the fact that while I don't have any recollection of things I have actually done, I have very vivid recollections of loads of things that I haven't done.

I have a lot of nice Italian winter clothes that make me look like a sophisticated Lebanese professor, so my friend Robert and I go around pretending to be experts in Arabic politics. It doesn't work in the summer though. I don't have the right clothes.