Someone once described me as the Zelig of comedy, and I think I know what he means.

Sometimes it's bad to do something you've never done before.

Sometimes it's good to do something that you've never done before, so yesterday, I went out to buy Elton John's new album.

The Bible has no doubt had much influence in its time, but it provides very few laughs. None, in fact.

The book may be garbage, but if it weighs in at a kilo or more, I stand before its author in awe.

The moon puts on an elegant show, different every time in shape, colour and nuance.

The outfits come and go but there is a constant that I like about the catwalk model: the snotty expression.

The pun exists in a social and political void, caring nothing for the issues of its day, content merely to display itself in its small cleverness.

The real change that paintings undergo is in the perceptions of the viewer.

Theatricals can be irritating, but will provide a better night out than mobile phone salespeople.

Travel books are, by and large, boring. They lodge uncomfortably between fact, fiction and autobiography.

When a writer dies you get a higher standard of obituary.

A female friend who caught me watching Fashion TV reckons its audience is largely made up of slobbering men who are just taking a break from the appalling Men & Motors channel. I don't agree.

A savage review is much more entertaining for the reader than an admiring one; the little misanthrope in each of us relishes the rubbishing of someone else.

Because comedy is cheap to put on: if you've got a play or an opera, there's a whole load of people and a set, but comedy is just one man or woman. And because TV has learned to love comics - there's so many more around now than when I started out.

Give me the new thing and give it to me now. I don't want that old thing - I've seen it, heard it, bought it, slept with it, loved it, but now I'm bored with the old thing and I'm gagging for the new stuff.

Global warming, the ongoing destruction of the planet, Third World debt, the uselessness of the railways, the takeover by the corporations, the scary George Bush person: all these things are important and should be animating me into outrage. Yet somehow they do not.

I have a suspicion that a lot of artists are trying to get a laugh but, unlike stand-ups, they don't get an immediate response from their audience; a laugh is a rare thing in a gallery.

I myself am pathetically impressed when I meet writers of very long novels. How can they spend so many hundreds of hours at the miserable, lonely pastime of creating fiction?

I've been trekking the hills and lanes of the British countryside for nearly four decades now and I've come to associate my passion with overexcited poets rather than pampered painters.