“There are lots of things I could have done for the money, but I’ve made a great living doing the things I want to do.”

I don’t consider myself Jewish. I am half-Jewish by race but not through my mother.

If only the strength of the love that people feel when it is reciprocated could be as intense and obsessive as the love we feel when it is not; then marriages would be truly made in heaven.

People who get through life dependent on other people’s possessions are always the first to lecture you on how little possessions count.

Comedy will always be central to what I do, it’s just an instinct for me, but I am a writer and always have been.

I did not vote Labour because they’ve heard of Oasis and nobody is going to vote Tory because William Hague has got a baseball cap.

And roast beef and Yorkshire pudding is my personal signature dish.

You think I look like a teletubby?

Sympathy for victims is always counter-balanced by an equal and opposite feeling of resentment towards them.

You didn’t wake up, your dreams just changed gear.

I find the fact that billionaires are quoted as if the fact that they are billionaires gives them some kind of wisdom is outrageous.

Beyond love, beyond unrequited love, perhaps even beyond any other passion known to humanity, deep, deep in the depths of the turgid, clinging, swamplike pit of despair that lies dormant within every soul, lurks JEALOUSY.

I see dull people as projects … to be reformed

Books are the key. A book cannot be accessed from afar. You have to hold it, you have to read it.

Yes, OK, farty is a silly word. I wish I’d never used it. I’m 34. Perhaps it was a word for my 20s.

Artists don’t create society, they reflect it

If I did things for the money, I’d have done adverts in the 1980s, when I was hot enough to be offered them, and ‘Police Academy 6,’ which I was asked to write.

We must accept life for what it actually is – a challenge to our quality without which we should never know of what stuff we are made, or grow to our full stature.

No great art has ever been made without the artist having known danger.

Mankind was never so happily inspired as when it made a cathedral.

Nothing made by brute force lasts.

If even dying is to be made a social function, then, grant me the favor of sneaking out on tiptoe without disturbing the party.

If your computer speaks English, it was probably made in Japan.

I don’t like to do material people have heard. Now, they like to hear material that they know, because that’s the stuff that made me famous, and, unfortunately, I don’t do a ton of it.

The Communist bloc of old was a study in the failure of failure. Losers in the Soviet economy were the people at the end of the long lines for consumer goods. Worse losers were the people who had spent hours getting to the head of the line, only to be told that the goods were unavailable.