All humour is critical, you know? You make stupid jokes. I mean, stupidity is an infirmity, isn't it?

English television from the Fifties to the Nineties was the least bad in the world, and now it's just as bad as it is anywhere.

The one thing I remember about Christmas was that my father used to take me out in a boat about ten miles offshore on Christmas Day, and I used to have to swim back. Extraordinary. It was a ritual. Mind you, that wasn't the hard part. The difficult bit was getting out of the sack.

It’s only on the brink that people find the will to change. Only at the precipice do we evolve.

The main evolutionary significance of humor is that it gets us from the closed mode to the open mode quicker than anything else.

Who's ever going to write a film in which I get the girl? Me!

The real religion is about the understanding that if we can only still our egos for a few seconds, we might have a chance of experiencing something that is divine in nature. But in order to do that, we have to slice away at our egos and try to get them down to a manageable size, and then still work some practiced light meditation. So real religion is about reducing our egos, whereas all the churches are interested in is egotistical activities, like getting as many members and raising as much money and becoming as important and high-profile and influential as possible.