Quotes from John Oliver

Being a Mets fan is like lending someone a lot of money and you just know that you'll never get paid back.

The disconnect between America and its military is shocking.

Australia turns out to be a sensational place, albeit one of the most comfortably racist places I've ever been in. They've really settled into their intolerance like an old resentful slipper.

There is so much cross-pollination between the U.S. and Britain in terms of comedians. British TV comedies work well in the U.S. American stand-ups make it big in Britain.

I'm not really much of an actor, so when I started on 'The Daily Show,' I was just trying to adopt the faux authority of a newsperson. Having a British accent definitely gave me a sonic leg up on that because there is a faux authority to the British accent in and of itself.

My family are from Liverpool, so I have some twang there - I have a Midlands accent, and I was raised about an hour north of London, so my voice is a mess. Although, to American ears, it sounds like the crisp language of a queen's butler.

Southern people are bigger-hearted and kinder than I had any right to expect.

A Southern accent is not a club in my bag.

In improv, the whole thing is that it is a relationship between the two people, as a back and forth. In standup, you don't really want to be listening to what somebody is saying; you want to project your jokes into their face. And that's really not a good instinct with a 'Daily Show' field piece, where it's supposed to be an interview.

In improv, the whole thing is that it is a relationship between the two people, as a back and forth. In standup, you don't really want to be listening to what somebody is saying; you want to project your jokes into their face.

I don't know if there is some psychological thing of wanting to know where your doctor got his degree from before he comes into the medical room.

Politics has become infused with narcissism in America.

When I heard that Hitler had problems with flatulence, it's funny. What - does that make him a funny man? No. It means he had funny moments when his rear end was speaking louder than his mouth.

I feel non-stop Brit shame!

I've made so many people angry that they kind of blur into one unpleasant memory of people staring at you with somewhere between passive aggression and active aggression.

The British media is sinking down, as the American news media has lowered the bar for all of humanity. British news media is definitely trying to stoop down to that level. Everyone is stooping to the lowest common denominator.

We in Britain stopped evolving gastronomically with the advent of the pie. Everything beyond that seemed like a brave, frightening new world. We knew the French were up to something across the Channel, but we didn't want anything to do with it.

When you're doing stand-up, you want to stand onstage and, to the extent that you can, uncomplicatedly entertain.

The poverty line is like the age of consent: if you find yourself parsing exactly where it is, you've probably already done something very, very wrong.

I can't relax. I find vacations problematic.

It really helps a comedian to be an outsider.

I really love stand-up. I'm more than happy to do it for nothing. I've come to America to do it for nothing. It's the American Dream: Work for free.

People are always going to say stupid things, and you're always going to be able to make jokes about that, but it should be the last thing you add in, because it's the easiest thing.

When you're dealing with serious subjects, there is a pressure to be absolutely sure that you know what you're doing.