Quotes from Jo Brand

The problem with comedy audiences - it's like the Coliseum - when they see someone struggling, they don't feel altruistic towards them. They feel slightly repulsed by it.

The comedian sticks as religiously to her theme as a dancer sticks to a diet.

On the whole, you can have a private life and be famous. But when milestones happen in your life like having children or getting married, privacy goes out of the window.

The funny thing is, I don't actually think of myself as fat at all. I don't think I am. Not really.

Again, with two small children it's incredibly hard to commit yourself to anything because you're just getting interested in it and someone comes along and goes I want Thomas The Tank Engine on, and screams the place down until you put it on.

School was great. There were no boys there, which didn't really bother me at the time because I had two brothers, so I was quite pleased not to spend any more time with boys.

I never think, 'Where am I going to be in a year's time?' That seems to be a sure way of missing the fact that you might be quite happy now.

You know it's time for a New Year's resolution to lose weight when you step on a talking scale and it says, "One at a time, please.

I believe that if your brain has to get to grips with complicated words, then you won't get Alzheimer's. I'm sure it's not true, but I do believe it.

I read that book 'Fat is a Feminist Issue', got a bit desperate halfway through and ate it.

There's a general sense that women are more relaxed and less defensive in comedy than they used to be. I think it's easier than it was but underlying it all there is still a pretty sexist view of women on stage, which to me hasn't changed that much.

I remember when Victoria Wood started to come through, and I thought she was great, though she and I are very different in our approach.

I've always been criticised for how filthy my material is. Victoria Wood said to me once, 'I wish I was a bit ruder, like you,' and I said, 'Well, I wish I was a bit cleaner, like you.'

I have two brothers and we basically spent our lives playing in the woods, falling in ponds, getting chased by wasps and riding donkeys that we shouldn't have been riding.

If you're a fat person - and especially if you're a woman - at all stages of your life you'll get abuse for it, so you have to work out a way of dealing with it. The best way is to be humorous about it - that defuses any tension.

They say revenge is a dish best eaten cold, but for most people, by the time it's ready to eat, they just don't fancy it any more.

I think it's difficult, if you're a quite private person like I am, to write about your life very intimately.

It wasn't a conscious effort to have kids later. It was just the way life goes.

I'm not a flag waver for obesity. It's not healthy, and you have a crap life because there is such a downer on it.

No one I know is actually so rude as to tell me I've become duller since having children. But I'm sure they think it.

I often tell audiences at the start of my shows that I'm not gay because I've got petitions from lesbian groups saying 'Can you tell people you're heterosexual because you're giving us a bad name.'

My father was an engineer and my mother was a social worker, and they met as young socialists. That probably tells you everything you need to know about my attitude to money - I've never really been bothered about it.

Even nice things don't make you happy when you're tired.

Anybody who has had the pleasure of reading an article about themselves in the press knows that, on the whole, there is a huge amount of inaccuracy, value judgment and the use of a crowbar to insert editorial bias that reflects the current political leaning of that particular paper.