Quotes from Richard Coles

I started playing the piano aged four in an effort to copy Grandpa, who was constantly showing off and entertaining us all, singing comic songs on his baby grand.

I completely understand why people would find the Church intolerable. I'm not the least bit surprised when people seek to leave it, though I miss them and I wish they'd stay. But I sometimes think you leave to come back, and that's certainly true in my case.

I think that Christians should have confidence, we have always been part of the mainstream conversation, and if we don't join in often what you hear gets hectoring and mad, just people on the margins.

I don't think you need to justify faith, faith is its own justification.

The thought of having sclerosis of the synapses is alarming. I wonder if in later life I will pay the price for having overstimulated my mental apparatus in my twenties.

I still feel a spike of anticipation when 'O Come, O Come, Emmanuel' strikes up and, in these andropausal years, I am unexpectedly moved by 'Away in a Manger'.

I wanted to put together a Christmas album that went back to the stable in Bethlehem and the source of it all. It kind of gets lost sometimes.

In corporate life, I have noticed, it is getting harder and harder to say that things are bad.

I don't think of myself as a maverick at all. Quite the opposite - I really think of myself as quite conventional but dispersed over unusual territory.

I am not in favour of hierarchies that grant privileges to members who fail to uphold those values - there are plenty of those - but the monarchy is really the Queen, who is of unimpeachable integrity and the longest serving head of state in the world, and who never puts a foot wrong.

I frequently find myself praying for punk, for something to come along and upset everybody and ignite a few fires and behave disreputably.

I just looked preposterous. It would be 'King Lear' and I'd walk on with Cordelia's dead body in my arms and the audience would hoot with laughter. The only time they didn't laugh was when I was doing comedy.

I am loathe to say I have a strategy in the broadcasting work I do, but I do think it is possible to be a priest who has something to contribute to mainstream media as long as you aren't completely mad.

Like most people, I cook about a dozen dishes, over and over again, and to stretch the menu has meant stretching my competence to breaking point.

Generally on a Saturday I come home wreathed in media glamour having interviewed a former Krankie or someone, and suddenly I am back in the world of orange blossom and bells.

I was licensed and installed as 59th Vicar of St Mary the Virgin, Finedon, in Northamptonshire, in 2011.

Food as sport is nothing new. To a vicar, especially, church catering has represented the conduct of war by other means for many years.

I was the middle child of three boys and grew up in the village of Barton Seagrave near Kettering, Northamptonshire. My father, Nigel, followed his father, Keith, into shoe manufacturing.

The thing I worry about with religion isn't to do much with forgetting Christmas. It's to do with religion being angry and violent.

This unthinking assumption of moral virtue on the Left is frustrating. I saw someone on Facebook talking about capitalist scum, he was angry and thought it was OK because his anger was righteous.