Alexei Sayle's Quotes

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.

I think that my ideas of the world are that it's random and cruel but kind of quite comical really, and therefore the humour, in a sense, springs from that.

I would say I was still a Marxist - which is not to be confused with being a Communist. Despite its flaws, Marxism still seems to explain the material world better than anything else.

I'm sure a psychologist would see something highly significant in how absent-minded I am. I mean I'd forget my head if it wasn't attached to my neck by muscles, ligaments and my esophagus.

Recently, my personal advisors have been telling me to go to America. Actually, people have been walking up to me in the street and telling me to sod off, but that's the same thing, isn't it?

The journalists have obviously failed to capture my innate magnetism, humour and charisma, and they all need to be fired from their newspapers right away.

Honestly, sometimes I get really fed up of my subconscious - it's like it's got a mind of its own.