“I spent my childhood scrambling round badgers and foxes and playing fantastic country kid games like knocking on people’s doors and running away. God that was a good game.”

In Unity there is strength; We can move mountains when we’re united and enjoy life – Without unity we are victims. Stay united.

I am a confectionery-based existentialist.

This shed does not contain me.

It’s not a beard, it’s an animal I’ve trained to sit very still.

Work hard, save and live within your means.

Without the beat in the background, Jazz basically sounds like an armadillo was let loose on the keyboard.

I think we’ve missed a trick there. We could develop wheat with the properties of Velcro… to catch whatever it is that’s forming those crop circles! But then the spaceship would have to have the corresponding Velcro, so it’s a bit of a long shot.

Tonight’s show is about doubt. Or maybe it isn’t – haven’t made my mind up yet.

I’m English, and as such I crave disappointment. That’s why I buy Kinder Surprise. Horrible chocolate; nasty little toy: a double-whammy of disillusionment! Sometimes I eat the toy out of sheer despair.

People say ‘Bill, are you an optimist?’ And I say, ‘I hope so.’

The so-called Samaritan squirrel, which takes pity on the spider, and then the spider jumps on it and injects the paralyzing venom, while the squirrel remains bafflingly philosophical about the whole thing.

Orchestras have often been used to conjure up the natural world: Swans, sharks, trout, but not, as far as I know, the often maligned jellyfish.

So many beautiful things, I cannot possess them all!

Live comedy’s a very reckless, foolhardy profession. You’re only as good as your last gig so earnings fluctuate.

But our country’s equivalent of gritty reality is more like “Look out Sarge, he’s got a shooter!”

I’m sort of like a post-modern vegetarian; I eat meat ironically.

Once you prove yourself, that you’re a utility player, they’re going to contact you and say, hey, yeah, we need you for a film next Thursday at Fox or Sony or whatever. You kind of get a reputation.

The Stag at Bay with the mentality of a fox at large.

After one of his [Hubert Humphrey] long-winded harangues I suggested he had probably been vaccinated with a phonograph needle. He responded by saying that I would have been a great success in the movies working for Eighteenth Century-Fox.

A fox is subtlety itself.