Quotes from Vic Reeves

The best way to fry an egg is to let the white out so it forms a base, then drop the yellow bit in the middle.

I've been accident-prone since I was a kid climbing trees and falling out. I've come off a few motorcycles.

I've got an incredibly acute sense of smell, like a bloodhound. My wife borrows perfumes off me. I play the bass, too.

I always wear ladies' scents. I like the smell of flowers and men's scents tend to smell like burnt photocopiers.

Well, I wouldn't say I am a keen gardener... I'm a gardener. Well, by that I mean I've got a very nice garden and have got some very good gardeners.

People think I'm a keen birdwatcher, but I don't go out of my way to look at birds. I'm not Bill Oddie. But I do know which are which. I keep my eyes open.

I think my comedy's probably the same as my art, which is kind of abstract, impressionist, emotional. You create an emotion and then you knock it down. You take something the way people are expecting it to go, and then give it a different conclusion.

You treat your body with the disrespect that you did as a young man and it starts catching up.

You never, ever leave art school. It's important to keep finding inspiration. I look at YouTube videos and think, 'How would I do that?' I like experimenting with things. For instance, drying paintings off too quickly in a microwave can look strangely beautiful.

Yeah, I was in a band called Trout.

In the 70s I started doing my Big Night Out on stage when I was at art school. A friend of mine owned a comedy club and sold it to me. I worked out quite quickly that if I did the comedy myself I'd make more money.

People sometimes get ideas about us that are not of our creation. Journalists, for instance, have always wanted us to be something we're not. They've said that we have a big student fan-base, but that's simply not true. We have loads of older fans as well. Increasingly, ladies in their mid-fifties seem to like us.

You can be a really terrible actor - I won't mention any names - but, as long as you're good-looking, you can get by with it. Okay, Keanu Reeves. He's a diabolical actor, but he still looks good.

I'm not convinced that creative people have mentors because that's what makes them different; they just do their own thing. If anyone had tried to tell me how to go about something, I'd have run a mile. But I have certainly had a few influences in my life.

That's the Daily Mail for you, they'll twist whatever you say and try and start a fight. They are terrible, awful gossip-mongers and troublemakers.

Most of my grudges are road-based. Parking and speeding fines.

Television was restricted by my parents. They encouraged reading more than anything. It wasn't done in a let's-get-educated kind of way, it was: 'This looks like it might be fun so let's do it.' There were a lot of castles, art galleries, museums and mountains to climb.

I couldn't ever stand up in front of an audience on my own and talk to them. It would be awful; I couldn't bear to do it.

If anything had happened to Bob, I wouldn't have carried on. Me and Bob are a comedy unit.

There are no statements in my paintings at all. Quite the opposite - I don't like people to go looking for them. If something makes me laugh, that's it.

I think everyone has to have some kind of hiatus at some point, if only for people to get nostalgic and remember. Then it comes back with a bigger bang. In the meantime, you have to keep busy doing other things.

I loved my parents. There were never any rows. It was a sort of artistic, bohemian upbringing.

When people say you can and can't say things, I don't know who's the authority on it. As long as you're kind, as long as you're not upsetting anyone. But that's a natural thing, isn't it? I would never do anything if I thought it was going to upset anyone.

Within comedy, macabre is the root, and a lot of art - Goya, Bosch, Dali - is macabre. Even Van Gogh, if he paints a chair, there's an element of the macabre within it.