Quotes from Tom Baker

The poor don't really like that ticket. They are desperate to get away and join the rich, and have glossy hair, bright eyes and white teeth. The rich live longer and can afford to be charming.

Poverty can curdle the libido and corrode civilized thoughts. One's sense of humour vanishes, to be replaced by a curry-spoiling sarcasm as one's Mr Hyde emerges from the swamp of the subconscious.

Once a man next to me found the handle of a radiator in his mashed potato; he said nothing, merely moving it to the side of his plate after sucking the mashed potato off it first. Nobody else said anything either. If the truth was known several of us were probably jealous.

I didn't care as an ex-ballet dancer wrote and told me she had seen the production and fallen in love with my legs. She said that in other circumstances she could have lived happily with my legs but that she only had a small flat in Holland Park.

I have never described the time I was in Doctor Who as anything except a kind of ecstatic success, but all the rest has been rather a muddle and a disappointment. Compared to Doctor Who, it has been an outrageous failure really - it's so boring.

We have newsreaders behaving like actors, lowering their voices if it's a sad story, as if we didn't know it's a sad story. There isn't a single cool newsreader.

We are pre-disposed for fantasy, there is a natural impulse for human beings to want to get off their heads or out of their heads in something in a substance or a drink or an idea or a religion which will comfort them and make life exciting.

The Old Testament is my favourite science fantasy reading.

Plenty of clever children have to pretend to be not clever or else they get bullied by the thick.

I was playing Rasputin and what was motivating him was crumpet really, and I was extremely keen on crumpet so I was really rather good as Rasputin. And my next catastrophic failure was Macbeth, who I played in the style of a crumpet-lover, and then when Doctor Who came along, I embraced this lunacy, this cloud-cuckoo-land where people had to be convinced by absolute nonsense. I came from a very religious background, so it was easy for me to believe in something I knew nothing about.

I never read the scripts at all carefully and never wanted to know what was going on, because i felt that being a benevolent alien, that's the way it should be

Friends remember you how you'd like to be remembered, and forget the rest. Friends turn up at the last moment, friends tell you to keep running.

I have never described the time I was in Doctor Who as anything except a kind of ecstatic success, but all the rest has been rather a muddle and a disappointment. Compared to Doctor Who, it has been an outrageous failure really - it's so boring.

We are pre-disposed for fantasy, there is a natural impulse for human beings to want to get off their heads or out of their heads in something in a substance or a drink or an idea or a religion which will comfort them and make life exciting.

We have newsreaders behaving like actors, lowering their voices if it's a sad story, as if we didn't know it's a sad story. There isn't a single cool newsreader.

I was never really happy until I became 'Doctor Who'.

I'm really not an actor of any kind. I've always seen myself as an entertainer, someone who makes people laugh. That's all I've ever wanted to do. 'Doctor Who' has always just been me, really.

It's funny, in literature no one ever goes to the lavatory.

One longs to be funny, to make people laugh. Laughter is such a sign of approval, isn't it?