Quotes from Bill Bailey

The point with me is that it's always been, even with the stand-up, that the music has to be right. You have to take it seriously. You have to try and play it as faithfully as possible. That way it helps the comedy. Rather than just playing it in a silly way.

I didn't have any brothers or sisters, so I did a lot of stuff where I entertained myself playing games, reading a lot, a lot of fantasy novel stuff.

A lot of the time, you need to find the right home for ideas. You know, sometimes you think 'oh this'd be a sitcom, oh, no it wouldn't, it'd be a drama, or an educational thing, or a doco or something.' I've got loads of ideas and you just have to keep sending them and pitching them.

We are almost in a time beyond jokes, beyond satire. When the Trump era is called the 'post-truth' period, then this is the greatest joke of all, albeit quite depressing.

At yoga you get some sense of spiritual space so that people don't intrude. You can go there and close your eyes and no one will talk to you. People are too worried about not fainting to bother with some bloke who was on the telly.

I've started doing Bikram yoga. You're in a boiling hot room, bending over pretending to be a locust, you can't do that at the gym.

I was asked to perform at the Olympics Opening Ceremony. But I was up a tree in Borneo filming a documentary about Alfred Russel Wallace! So it couldn't be done.

I used to like beer, but it makes me feel slightly queasy.

The Dutch do have a slightly odd sense of humour.

I said to my wife that if I had enough money I'd have my arms lengthened. Slightly longer arms would be great.

I don't like labels. I have always fought against that as a stand-up.

As a young man, the temptation was to drink the minibar dry. I did all that - now I prefer to get outdoors.

My grandfather had strong opinions. He was an argumentative character and quite staunchly socialist.

My earliest memory is feeling soil between my fingers when I was around three years old.

I have sold stuff door-to-door, but not doors.

Normally, with stand-up, it's quite solitary, you write the material on your own, you perform it on your own, it's all very much on you. Your own thoughts. You have to sort of modulate your own performance.

Melbourne has great eateries and you can go birdwatching.

I think happiness really happens when you least expect it: it's when you're not really thinking about it, when you're not trying to achieve it, when you're not trying to get the perfect holiday, the perfect life, the perfect body, the perfect existence.

In my twenties, I floated around for years, doing the odd theatre job but mainly leading a hedonistic lifestyle, getting intoxicated in plenty of different ways in plenty of different places.

Twenty-two years I've been doing this comedy lark, so it's been like a meteoric rise to fame... if the meteor was being dragged by an arthritic donkey across a ploughed field, in northern Poland.

In 1994 I was doing a two-hander with Sean Lock in Edinburgh and there were more people in the cast than the audience. It was pretty grim, quite a chastening experience.

Do not crush the flowers of wisdom with the hobnail boots of cynicism.

People perceive me as this kind of hippy intellectual, reflecting and communing with nature or in a pyramid somewhere chanting. Really, no. I love speed, fast things, quad and road bikes, and bombing down a mountain.

Three women walk into a pub and say, 'Hooray, we've colonised a male-dominated joke format'