It's been Bill for so long people think my name is William, but it's not, it's Mark.

My grandparents would have big, long arguments that were entertaining and that's where I first noticed, and was thrilled by, political discourse.

There was something about stand-up that music wouldn't give me, which was my love of the spoken word and the mercurial tendency of language to respond to what happens to you.

I don't like labels. I have always fought against that as a stand-up.

I said to my wife that if I had enough money I'd have my arms lengthened. Slightly longer arms would be great.

I used to like beer, but it makes me feel slightly queasy.

I've started doing Bikram yoga. You're in a boiling hot room, bending over pretending to be a locust, you can't do that at the gym.

I hate getting ill, it irritates me so I try to stay reasonably healthy.

I've always been envious of certainty, of people who always seemed to have a plan for their lives.

I've always been reasonably upbeat about most things.

In 1994 I was doing a two-hander with Sean Lock in Edinburgh and there were more people in the cast than the audience. It was pretty grim, quite a chastening experience.

The devil's in the detail and sometimes if you're thinking too big, you can miss the detail.

I play the piano and that's how I learned about music. I then taught myself the guitar, drums, percussion and various other things, such as the bazooka, the mandolin, the Theremin, the alpine horn, the didgeridoo.

Films and gaming are blurring together, and it makes for brilliant popcorn entertainment.

When you're a birder, you have all sorts of reference books, and you know about migratory patterns and technical stuff. Most people just look out the window, and say 'is that a pigeon?'

I think gaming has influenced popular culture in a huge way. It's worked its way into novels, and blockbuster movies.

I didn't have any brothers or sisters, so I did a lot of stuff where I entertained myself playing games, reading a lot, a lot of fantasy novel stuff.

If you're going to perform, you're going to attract criticism. You can't please everyone all the time. You don't know how things are going to come out. But that's part of the fun of it, the adventure of doing any kind of art.

Twenty-two years I've been doing this comedy lark, so it's been like a meteoric rise to fame... if the meteor was being dragged by an arthritic donkey across a ploughed field, in northern Poland.

People are obsessed by how I look.

I think happiness really happens when you least expect it: it's when you're not really thinking about it, when you're not trying to achieve it, when you're not trying to get the perfect holiday, the perfect life, the perfect body, the perfect existence.

I'm one for new things: I like new technology, I like new music, I'm not entrenched in some view of what culture should be. I like the fact that it's constantly changing and that language is changing, that behaviour changes.

I think that generally there's a pressure to live the best life you can.

I quite like confounding people's expectations.