Quotes By Alexei Sayle

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

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.

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.

If someone starts agreeing with me, I don't like it. Out of pique, I become something else.

I'm an intellectual.

I liked 35 and in both my novels that is the age of the lead characters. I tried making them my age but they just seemed to keep moaning about stuff.

However, my problems with my memory are further complicated by the fact that while I don't have any recollection of things I have actually done, I have very vivid recollections of loads of things that I haven't done.

I always thought communism was crap, really.

People aren't universally heroic.

Honestly, sometimes I get really fed up of my subconscious - it's like it's got a mind of its own.

It seems easier to make a career out of comedy now than it was in the 1980s.

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.

You can't do comedy with a beard.

I wanted to write about how people's beliefs shift.

Recently, my personal advisors have been telling me to go to America. Actually, people have been walking up to me in the street and telling me to sod off, but that's the same thing, isn't it?

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.

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

The journalists have obviously failed to capture my innate magnetism, humour and charisma, and they all need to be fired from their newspapers right away.

I don't think people were that interested in what I was doing for the most of the 1990s.

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.

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

Everyone I used to work with is still alive and can afford expensive lawyers.

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.

I feel sorry for many politicians... we expect them to be completely consistent and moralised when we're not.

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.'

I'm distinct, really.

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