I do notice that when I've been away and I come back to London. People look at you. People are ready to pick arguments.

Because I am an Englishman I spent most of my life in a state of embarrassment.

The skill of a good actor is to make it always seem like you're in that fantastically spontaneous moment. Very often, a stand-up comedian has a different instinct, which is to reinvent. Once you've laid down some material, and made them laugh, you move on and find some new material.

Almost every comedy you see is about people making all wrong choices and making all the errors of judgement possible. Good comedy is when it works on this scale. Because it is psychologically very real.

Forget trying to be sexy. That's just gruesome.

I don't know if this qualifies as gentle reassurance, but right now this is all that stands between me and a Harley-Davidson.

I can actually get involved in getting stories off the ground that no one would ask me to be in because I'm the wrong age, the wrong sex, the wrong nationality, or whatever. I've found it quite exhilarating to have that freedom to tell the stories that aren't just about middle-aged white English guys.