Quotes from Sandi Toksvig

I can't see words without reading them.

Later that afternoon we went in search of some nomads. This is not easy as nomads are never at home.

We had a small above-ground swimming pool in the back garden and I have a photo of my father sitting in the canoe and sipping whisky while floating in the pool. He had bought it from a second-hand shop and I suspect my dad had been drinking before the purchase as well as after.

It never ceases to amaze me how many women struggle with self-belief while the vast majority of men have no trouble with it at all.

The woman next to me has no laces in her shoes and looks exhausted. She carries her belongings in a faded carrier bag. I cannot tell how old she is. Somewhere between forty and death.

I got the part in the film and quickly learned how unimportant I was. It was shot in a rather grand house in Hampstead. You could tell the owners were rich. The place was decorated with that disregard for either fashion or comfort which only the British who inherit wealth seem to manage.

I think one of the great dangers faced by women over sixty in this country is starving to death in a restaurant. We were invisible.

Then we got a new games mistress called Miss Smith. She was young and good fun. She taught dance, loved music and a laugh. She also talked about God. A lot. She had been 'born again', which seemed an unpleasant thought.

Middle age is when you're sitting at home on a Saturday night and the telephone rings and you hope it isn't for you. Ogden Nash (1902–71), American poet I

It was only a few years ago that Madame Tussaud's announced that the company had found it necessary to use glue to 'fix' one of its most popular wax figures. 'Every time we passed by,' a curator explained, 'Bill Clinton's zipper was undone.

I was once on a Tube train late at night when a young man sitting opposite pointed to his crotch and demanded, 'What do you think of that?' Thinking he might be showing me some interesting point in a book, I replied, 'I'm sorry, I can't see anything small without my specs.' He fled at the next station and it was only when he got up that I realised he hadn't been carrying a book at all.

I love passion perhaps more than anything. I think life is nothing without it and we all strive to feel it every day for those we love and for what we do, and even if it's just for sausages it is a fine thing.

One night I came home to find the landlady scrubbing blood off the front step. 'Been a murder,' she said, 'but it's all right. Wasn't one of ours.' There's a comfort. I wonder what Alice Diamond would have made of it.

Blake, the English painter, poet and printmaker, was clearly a man stuck in the P section of potential careers. Now he is considered a great artist, but in his lifetime he was largely ignored or thought to be mad. I suspect it was because he was a gloriously original thinker, and no one ever really likes that.

scientists say that being fat can lead to dementia. I have decided, however, to throw caution to the winds and proceed with my all-cream-cake regime. It seems to me that the fatter I get, the fewer places I will go and so the less I will have to remember.

Sailors will tell you that seasickness comes in two stages – in the first you think you're going to die and in the second you're very afraid you're not going to.

He made money in pawnbroking and moneylending, which is never nice, but also traded in goat skins – which is at least unusual.

Most people on the bus seem to have no interest in looking out of the window for inspiration. They are engrossed in their phones. People constantly checking their messages seems to me rather like endlessly opening the front door just in case an unexpected visitor has turned up.

As Charlotte Brontë said, 'Happiness quite unshared can scarcely be called happiness; it has no taste.' Parts

In medieval times there was great anxiety over the belief that witches liked to steal penises and keep them as pets.

My now wife Debbie is a therapist, and over and over she has witnessed that the best cure for distress is love.

Did you know that 75 per cent of people who read the sentence, 'It is not possible to lick your own elbow', will try? The other 25 per cent work for the parcel delivery service and would like you to try for them.

I loved it and the only things that came between me and a career in the stars was an inability to comprehend science and a fear of flying.

I'm trying to get my kids - in particular, my step-daughter Mary, who's 12 - to recommend music to me. You reach a certain age and realise you haven't kept up, but I don't want to fall behind.