I loved the idea of Bowie as an artist, with his Burroughsian cut-up technique, creating these undecipherable, abstract songs, where we all projected our own meanings onto his jarring word choices and unexpected chord changes.

Comedians shame people.

I've said jokes where I thought people might get up and hit me for this. A couple of people have thought about it. But they didn't. It gives you a lot of power, because if you're on shows where people are worried about getting sacked and you're not, then you're transcendent because you say what other people would like to say.

I read tons of comic books. My favourite is Grant Morrison, a Scottish comic writer.

I absolutely loathe adverts. I won't go into the cinema until 20 minutes after the film is due to start because there are so many.

Comedy is a terrible way to meet women. It's certainly a way to start talking to them, but they always have preconceptions about you.

I've never felt any sense of kinship with other comedians; they've always seemed too needy.

I have some friends who are comedians but not many.

I love the BBC and I think it's a really important thing.

I'm not cynical at all.

That's what I do in my stand-up. I work hard and hone the material and after a while audiences expect what I do to be good.

I think the most important things my book does is to give readers the address of George Monbiot's website and how to get hold of comic books by Grant Morrison.

The thing that nobody really said about Rebecca Adlington is that she looks pretty weird. She looks like someone who's looking at themselves in the back of a spoon.

How hard is it to get female panellists?

I did a ski festival in Austria once. I was struck by how friendly Austrians were, before gradually realising it's more that Glaswegians are awful.

There's still a lot of racism in stand-up.

Supporting Celtic, waving a tricolour because your parents are Irish - that's a valid culture.

Supporting Rangers, being in an Orange Lodge, that whole life - that's a valid culture.

I think you have a lot of rich and Conservative people who control our country who are racist and their views trickle down through things like tabloid papers.

In a lot of farther-flung places in Scotland people are guarded at first, but as soon as they get to know you they really hate you.

There are a lot of problems with democracy. We need to think about how to find the people most qualified for the job.

People feel much more comfortable with the 'Fifty Shades of Grey' version of women's liberation: possibly feeling life would be much simpler if the suffragettes hadn't wanted the vote and just really enjoyed chaining themselves to railings.

I think we live in a quite an immoral society with quite an amoral government and they're going to have to grow up in that and negotiate their own way in it.

The No 1 priority in TV comedy today is 'don't frighten the horses,' and it's probably No 2 and 3 as well.

I think there is racism at the heart of British policy and has been both in Labour and Conservative times.

We need to take urgent action on climate change.

If I ever get to meet Vladimir Putin, I will probably take my top off and challenge him to an erotically charged wrestling match, which I will let him win.

Corbyn sounds like a dreadful town, dresses like a catalogue model for the Sue Ryder shop and won't look significantly different when he's been dead for a week.

I'm totally off any caffeine now.

Admittedly, the Conservatives are generally more persuasive orators than their Labour counterparts, perhaps a skill developed by spending school holidays trying to lure father out from behind his Daily Telegraph.

Of course, it's absurd that we trust the Tories with our day-to-day reality, as so many of them don't really inhabit it. Why elect people to run our schools and hospitals who choose not to go to those schools and hospitals?

If leadership is about listening, the great political speeches would have been a little different.

Creationists have often made me doubt evolution, but probably not in the way they think.

Somehow, I always imagine that Trump spends the evenings with his forehead pressed against the cold glass of an aquarium, talking telepathically to the tormented albino squid in which he has hidden his soul.

Perhaps we've got so involved in the false selves we project on social media that we've forgotten that our real selves, our private selves, are different, are worth saving.

In times of crisis, we are made to feel we should scrutinise our government's actions less closely, when surely that's when we should pay closest attention.

Our attitudes are fostered by a society built on ideas of dominance, where the solution to crises are force and action, rather than reflection and compromise.

The truth is that modern governments sit at the head of a well-funded security apparatus. They are told that foreign military adventures put domestic populations at risk and they give them the thumbs up anyway.

Isis want to destroy the knowledge that Islam is a beautiful, scientific and intelligent culture, and we are way ahead of them.

People are medicated and TV is one of the things that they are medicated with.

People internalise marketing.

People hate jokes.

Ed Miliband's anti-immigration stance is odd: it's hard to vote for a man who doesn't have the confidence to defend his own existence.

The SNP are far from radical, but they do have a knack for producing the odd simple, progressive policy that's hard to argue against.

To support policies that dehumanise others is to dehumanise yourself.

There are many indicators of advanced civilisations, but unthinking hero worship of the military isn't one of them.

We live in a country where posting 'Let's riot or something bruv!' on Facebook will get you a couple of years in prison, while writing a column saying we should bomb Syria is practically an entrance exam for public intellectuals.

Internationally, I propose the radical step of not trying to solve complex political problems with 1,000lb bombs; domestically, I propose they start addressing inequality by paying reparations for slavery. I'm well aware that in a society where war and discrimination are now almost entirely normalised, both options sound like madness.

Bombing Syria will achieve nothing.

For anyone who has ever asked why the U.S. needs to address the issue of reparations for its history of slavery, Donald Trump is why. He is the living embodiment of America's unresolved issues.