“It’s the augmented fourth, or diminished fifth, depending on your outlook on life.”

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.

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.

If you look carefully, almost all Old Money secrets can be traced to a single source: a longer-term outlook.

What you think determines your outlook on life. What you do determines your destiny.

Knowledge is silver. Outlook is gold. IQ is a lead weight.

If we could be freed from our aversion to loss, our whole outlook on risk would change.

Although the outlook is clouded by a number of uncertainties, the central tendencies of the projections .. imply continued good economic performance in the United States.

We should put away the militaristic outlook.

I am seventy years old, a gray age weighted with uncompromising biblical allusions. It ought to have a gray outlook, but it hasn’t, because a glint of dazzling sunshine is dancing merrily ahead of me.

Diaries tell their little tales with a directness, a candor, conscious or unconscious, a closeness of outlook, which gratifies our sense of security. Reading them is like gazing through a small clear pane of glass. We may not see far and wide, but we see very distinctly that which comes within our field of vision.