“I’d always been scared of people with tertiary education and high intellects in case they found me wanting. I thought they viewed me as just a welder who knew a few jokes.”

There’s one of a figure with two heads that somebody thought must be a comment on the state of matrimony. None of it is a comment on anything.

I loathe hecklers. I haven’t got a good syllable to say. When you come out of the club circuit and into the concert hall, they should be gone.

I don’t believe in angels, no. But I do have a wee parking angel. It’s on my dashboard and you wind it up. The wings flap and it’s supposed to give you a parking space. It’s worked so far.

I decided to stop drinking while it was still my idea.

Politically correct is the language of cowardice.

I don’t think I’ve ever died on stage. I’ve had jokes that died on stage. I’ve told a joke and absolutely nothing. They didn’t know it was the end of the joke.

[To audience members who were arriving late] You haven’t missed a thing, I was just killing time ’til you got here.

The strangest thing is at tea breaks, or coffee breaks or lunch, you forget you’re a zombie. And you’re talking about politics to somebody at the table and you forget that you have a bullet hole in your forehead.

I used to be a folk singer, but I was… dreadful. I had a voice like a goose farting in the fog.

I became a welder. I was actually becoming an Engineer and I joined the wrong queue. And so I became a welder, without knowing what a welder was.

Scotland has the only football team in the world that does a lap of disgrace.

It’s my mind, and I reserve the right to change it as often as I like.

Without arts programmes there’s only reality TV, and reality TV needs the arts to show it what reality is.

For me, it’s about the desire to win. My audience becomes a crowd of wild animals and I have to be the lion-tamer or be eaten.

I worry about ridiculous things, you know, how does a guy who drives a snowplough get to work in the morning. … That can keep me awake for days.

didn’t even know there were specialist zombie magazines and clubs. I heard the other day that a radio station had asked people if they`d made preparations for an attack by zombies, and a staggering number of people replied yes!

I found out that a person named Elizabeth Frazier was living with AIDS at the time, and so I called her up, and she took a meeting with me.

She was snatched back from a dream of far countries, and found herself on Main Street.

My soul found ease and rest in the companionship of books.

It is only in the mysterious equations of love that any logic or reasons can be found.

After the first establishment of identity there comes the imperative need to lose this new-found sense of separateness and to belong to something larger and more powerful than the weak, lonely self. The sense of moral isolation is intolerable to us.

When I found out more about the Maori culture, I fell in love with it, and with the people, too.

To what greater inspiration and counsel can we turn than to the imperishable truth to be found in this treasure house, the Bible?

I have found it easier to identify with the characters who verge upon hysteria, who were frightened of life, who were desperate to reach out to another person.