Quotes from Bill Bailey

You have to have a thick skin, yes. If you're going to do something as foolhardy as standup, you've got to be able to take it on the chin if someone has a go at you.

Great music and great artists create their own music and look and are not manufactured.

London is a great place to be over Christmas.

Doing comedy around the world is a way of finding out how people tick.

I hate getting ill, it irritates me so I try to stay reasonably healthy.

When you say 'Hello Wembley!' you're not just saying hello to a large shed. You're saying, 'Hello, I'm following all the greats that have played here before.'

I think gaming has influenced popular culture in a huge way. It's worked its way into novels, and blockbuster movies.

I did a show in this tiny town called Longyearbyen. We went snowmobiling around Svalbard and saw Arctic foxes, snow bunting, polar bear footprints and almost got lost in a blizzard.

There was an existential moment - I don't know if I want to call it crisis - when I turned 50 and I felt 'this is interesting; how did this happen?' It affected me in a way I wasn't expecting. It made me pause for reflection.

I think people are quite refreshed with politicians who aren't concerned with what Arctic Monkeys track they like, but with the day-to-day, dull business of politics.

The worst thing is when people try and take pictures surreptitiously. I always say, 'Look, you can ask me for a photograph. You will get a much better one than just the side of my face.' Sometimes they just run off. They can't cope.

I realised that the 'future' is different to how I imagined it. When I was a kid I thought it would be a bright, shiny Tomorrow's World. It isn't.

Somehow the Tories have deflected the righteous anger at the bankers who we bailed out. The Tories manage to take that outrage and direct it at benefit claimants. It's genius. Evil genius.

I grew up in a little town between Bath and Bristol with my parents and grandparents in the same house. It was rural and idyllic.

The hedgehog is sacred.

The scotch egg is such a Scottish food. It's as though a great Scottish chef said "I need a tasty snack. Let's take an egg... and wrap it in meat! Makes it a bit harder".

Juxtaposition, you can't handle the juxtaposition!

God, I'm in the same studio as de Burgh! He may have stood right where I'm standing now... and just thought his mad thoughts. Like "I am brilliant."

Tonight's show is about doubt. Or maybe it isn't - haven't made my mind up yet.

I'm English, and as such I crave disappointment. I actively seek it out.

A lot of people say there's a fine line between genius and insanity. I don't think there's a fine line, I actually think there's a yawning gulf. You see some poor bugger scuffling up the road with balloons tied to his ears, he's not going home to invent a rocket, is he?

I'm quite lucky, because I've got a small, decorative concrete pig.

A horse walks into a bar, and the barman says "Why the long face?". The horse replies: "I'm deeply troubled by the anthropomorphic aspects of my existence and the extent to which I am now protected by law."

Or, as I call it, a Cheesel, it's a Weasel with a Cheese finish.