Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Where you have 20 people who all share roughly the same educational and life experiences, they're going to come up with the same solutions to the same problems.
I've read the Bible, but I felt like a lot of the Bible was oppressive towards women. Then I read the Quran, and I thought it was also oppressive towards women.
Feminism isn't about hating men. It's about challenging the absurd gender distinctions that boys and girls learn from childhood and carry into their adult lives.
My parents' marriage was already shaky when I came along. They split up when I was five, and I didn't see Dad all that often after that - four or five times a year.
I've been called funny. I assume my wife thinks I'm funny. But generally, if you bumped into me and said hello, I would say hello back, politely. And that would be it.
If I told my 18-year-old self that one day I'd have a sitcom and a sketch show on TV, I think he'd just drum his fingers and go, 'When? How long is that going to take?'
A waiter at the hotel kept telling me that Cape Town is just like a European city, but it's not like that at all. It doesn't feel safe, and I didn't really go out at night.
When the Mac ad campaign was in full swing, I quickened my pace as I went past certain bus stops. My wife told me that she loyally took a piece of chewing gum off my nose once.
Ukippers are the kinds of fools who haven't noticed they're sleep-walking towards fascism. Many UKIP candidates are of the age when their parents fought in the Second World War.
I proposed to my wife on Brighton Beach, and she said yes. That's pretty romantic. Even though I forgot to go down on one knee because I was too busy trying to compose the question.
I was the youngest of three brothers by five years, so I spent most of my childhood playing alone, being Zorro or some other superhero, doing Lego, watching telly and riding my bike.
I grew up in Lincolnshire, trying to get the daughters of farmers and policemen to like me. It didn't go well until I got to college where, suddenly, there were different sorts of humans.
One thing about the fantasy dinner party idea that no one considers is whether these people are going to get on. I would say John McEnroe and Ian McEwan, but what would they have to say to each other?
When I present those clip shows and movie mistakes and things, the persona the writers adopt for me is unimpressed, superior, very sarcastic - I'm not any of that. I can do it, but that's not what I'm like.
Like most men, I can't say I am thrilled my hair's falling out, but then, if I really cared, I suppose I would wear a wig, get transplants, or start taking special pills, so I am obviously just putting up with it.
Missing out an apostrophe or two does not make you an idiot. But equating party allegiance with nationhood certainly makes you a thug. And thugs don't often notice that they're thugs, usually because they're also idiots.
I suppose if I went to Turkey - I mean, I can't imagine going that far away, but if I did go to Turkey, yes, I would probably try to know 'please' and 'sorry' and 'thank you', and 'a beer please', and all the useful words.
Slow, skinny, and an utter countryside coward: I lived in dread of nettles, spiders, and the very sound of a wasp. As a victim, I was beneath the dignity of the bullies in my year but fair game to the ones in the year below.
Parenting girls makes you quite gender-conscious - it's almost impossible to fight the power of pink. It's not such a terrible thing to want to be a princess when you're five, but it would be nice if there were some other options.
I don't really have that much contact with Americans. I mean, I see the oddest things on the Internet, I suppose. And I've got a couple of American friends, but they are Anglophiles anyway because they've decided to come live here.
I'm troubled by how much I like Rowan Williams. I think it reveals character flaws in myself that I'd rather not think about. The softly spoken soon-to-be-former Archbishop of Canterbury is my secret crush, my weird pash, and my guilty pleasure.
When I look in the mirror, I see the ageing process at full pelt, the hairline in retreat, the bags under the eyes growing and darkening, that kind of thing. I suppose it would be easier if I weren't an actor, but I am fairly philosophical about it.
Mum was an amazing parent and my best pal. The tragedy of it, really, was that she died from breast cancer just as I was becoming a man, aged 17, and we were just starting to speak as adults. She was snatched away, and it felt cruel. She made me laugh.
Ambiguity around ambiguity is forgivable in an unpublished poet and expected of an arts student on the pull: for a professional comedian demoting himself to the role of 'thinker', with stadiums full of young people hanging on his every word, it won't really do.
We got our revolution out of the way long before the French and the Americans. The monarchy was restored, but the sovereignty of our parliament, made up of and elected by a slowly widening constituency of the people, has never been seriously challenged since then.
I had a friend at college who took being poor very personally. He started showering in the sports centre next door and said he wasn't going to pay for the hot water in our flat any more because he didn't use it. He made me and my other friend pay the bills on our own.
When I was 18, I was halfway up the Eiffel Tower with my friend, Tom, when we decided to stick our heads through the railings. The gap between the railings was exactly the right size to be able to put your head through and nearly get stuck. Which is exactly what happened.
Car-essential is a real turn-off to me, so yeah, I just want a friendly holiday resort with a villa and a pool, but which is really private, but there again, there's a supermarket and a doctor's and a beach a five-minute walk away. That's all I want, and it's quite difficult to find.
We are people, individuals comprising a variety of sexes, races, shifting sexualities and all the rest of it. Every convention that tries to reinforce this difference is a step back. Notions of gender pointlessly separate men from women, but also mothers from daughters and fathers from sons.
I don't care where you went to school. There - have I made your day? No? All right, I'll go further: I also don't care what your dad did for a living or how your mum voted. Nor do I mind whether you ate your tea in front of the telly, dinner at the kitchen table, or supper in the dining room.
I think of myself as naturally idle. The trouble is, the 'nothing' that I do every day is not really nothing. I potter. I muck about with emails, I make coffee, I fiddle with my computer to make sure that the book I haven't started writing is perfectly synced across all platforms and devices.
If I hadn't got into comedy, I wouldn't have met Abbey, my wife, and I wouldn't have my two girls, and the whole thing unravels. That's the thing about being basically - whisper it quietly - happy, is that you don't really want to change anything, because once you start changing stuff, then what you've got all disappears.