“I think age is terribly overrated. You’re okay as long as you don’t grow up. By all means grow old, but don’t mature. Remain childlike, retain wonder, the ability to be flabbergasted by something.”

I am totally, absolutely romantic. When I broke up with a girl I would listen to the most heart-breaking music and make it worse. That’s what girls do. I think I am a girl really.

Well, the film’s not only pricking the pomposity of the Church, it’s pricking the pomposity, and sometimes you would think fraudulence, of the insurance companies.

The human race has been set up. Someone, somewhere, is playing a practical joke on us. Apparently, women need to feel loved to have sex. Men need to have sex to feel loved. How do we ever get started.

The religion in Scotland is one of the most patronising things… after the weather.

I still do my comedy and my performance stuff and my acting so it’s not all-consuming. But I do find myself drawing more and more these days.

I think of my life as a series of moments and I’ve found that the great moments often don’t have too much to them.

I’m not going to throw away the hand of friendship to suit 100 Trotskyites in Glasgow.

I hate those earnest TV documentaries that are the world according to people with glasses who know better than you.

Behind the proscenium arch, you can’t always hear what people in the audience are saying.

Sometimes there’s a tackiness about Route 66 that out-tacks any tackiness I’ve ever seen anywhere else. And the Meramec Caverns are the pinnacle of that tack.

I set out to be a cross between Lenny Bruce and Robert the Bruce – my main thrust was the body and its functions and malfunctions – the absurdity of the thing.

I loved Japan. I used to read a lot about it when I was a child. And I always wanted to go. And it was delightful. I absolutely loved it. What a smashing place.

I don’t have wild dogs chasing people with scripts away from my door. I get my share. I’ve done okay. But I usually do independent stuff because that’s mostly what I’m offered.

When I was 12, we went from Glasgow to Aberdeen on a school trip. It was called fresh air fortnight.

There’s nothing like it, but it’s not as good as you think it’s going to be. . . . I was disappointed because there are records of people finding things that have been there for years. I was hoping for a shirt button, or my club’s badge – but not a sausage.

Don’t buy one of those baby intercoms. Babies pretend to be dead. They’re bastards, and they do it on purpose.

Which seems no less relevant in the secular realm than in the religious one-that we have within us a precious, childlike, vulnerable core which we should nourish and nurture on its turbulent journey through life.