Quotes from Alexei Sayle

Dire Straits is a great band. Someone tells you they like 'Brothers in Arms' and immediately you know they're a stupid annoying git.

A lot of those comics can't hold down relationships and they've got no other life apart from performing. They sleep in their Jags and a lot of them can't even talk. All they can do is tell gags.

I'm fascinated by comedy.

I'm still fiercely ambitious.

I did six series for the BBC and that was enough. I've been writing for ten years, which is more challenging artistically.

I feel really ambiguous about the psychology of people trying to do good in the world.

Despite its flaws, Marxism still seems to explain the material world better than anything else.

I would say I was still a Marxist - which is not to be confused with being a Communist. Despite its flaws, Marxism still seems to explain the material world better than anything else.

I don't think I'd ever get thin, but I don't see why I should necessarily think that I couldn't You can't live your life for your routines.

I am quite girly.

I have a lot of nice Italian winter clothes that make me look like a sophisticated Lebanese professor, so my friend Robert and I go around pretending to be experts in Arabic politics. It doesn't work in the summer though. I don't have the right clothes.

I think that my ideas of the world are that it's random and cruel but kind of quite comical really, and therefore the humour, in a sense, springs from that.

I've accentuated the look over the years. As a comic, you try something and if it works you go with it and grind it to death.

As a comic, you try something and if it works you go with it and grind it to death.

I suppose the common idea of me is that I'm going to be someone who's hyper and cracking jokes all the time, but people who meet me are soon disabused of that notion.

Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, may have had his charms, but he really couldn't be considered hip.

I exist as an annexe of the BBC. I'm down the road a bit from the main building, in a little hut.

I'm an intellectual.

I've been going to Granada for many years and 12 years ago bought a house a few miles outside the city.

If sitcoms were easy to write, there'd be a lot of good ones, and there aren't.

If you travel to the States... they have a lot of different words than like what we use. For instance: they say 'elevator', we say 'lift'; they say 'drapes', we say 'curtains'; they say 'president', we say 'seriously deranged git.'

But as in all cults, what's central to the Communist Party is the belief system and the elimination of nuance. From there you're very slowly led down the road to fanaticism and mass murder.

For me, the showbiz memoir is uninteresting - you want to tell people something they don't know about.

Now, as a comic, if you're vaguely amusing you can go straight into TV, then you play the O2 and then everyone's sick of you.