People will kill you over time, and how they'll kill you is with tiny, harmless phrases, like 'be realistic.'

I quite fancy the 1940s. I like the trams and the trousers.

I'm not drunk onstage, although I've done that a couple of times when I was younger. It's partly just the way I talk - I talk like somebody in a rocking chair. I'm your 150-year-old grandmother.

I think that women just have a primeval instinct to make soup, which they will try to foist on anybody who looks like a likely candidate.

I have a very low level of recognition, which is fine by me.

I enjoy performing, always, but when you're taping a gig, you've got to blank out this mass apparatus of self-consciousness that's surrounding you, this invitation to drown in self-consciousness. Otherwise you just won't be able to do anything.

Some people have told me that I'm grumpy; it's not something that I'm aware of. It's not like I walk around poking children in the eye... not very small ones, anyway.

You can't please everyone, nor should you seek to, because then you won't please anyone, least of all yourself.

Children are the most honest critics. They will say 'You're funny', but also 'You're pathetic - go away.'