Quotes from Nish Kumar

For many of us, football is both a source of frustration and absolute euphoria.

Every day I wake up and think: 'Am I part of the problem? Am I helping further entrench the political divide? All the raging mouthpieces of the right that I'm furious with - am I just the same but on the left?' I have no easy answers to that.

I spend a lot of time bathing in a glow of consensus, but you have to be willing to say something to people who might not agree with you and take the consequences of what follows.

I spend a lot of time bathing in a glow of consensus but you also have to be willing to say something to people who might not agree with you and take the consequences of what follows.

Doing political comedy you do feel guilty that you aren't trying to change problems, you are merely exploiting them for your own financial gain.

I wish sometimes I had a passion for hats and cheese and I could do a fun show about putting hats on cheese.

I have a Stratocaster, which is part of my long, doomed ambition to become Jimi Hendrix.

Everywhere's a party with me - I'm a factory of good times.

When I left my family home and had finished university, I stayed in South London but moved closer to London's center, to Brixton and Herne Hill. Herne Hill is a tiny place that is ridiculously overstocked with lovely pubs.

When refugees are at a distance it's easy to be compassionate.

I like having my mistakes corrected, but I wonder if it's because you're forced to have a certain humility if you're not an affluent white man.

I'm a touring standup comedian so a lot of the time I'm looking for box sets that I can put on my computer to pass the time on train journeys. I have far too much free time for an adult.

We've all been there - you find something moving, you commission a painting. I know one wall of my living room is taken up by a mural of the end of Toy Story 3.

Frustration with the trains is inevitable, given the daily difficulties commuters face.

You have to have your own internal barometer of what is too far. I try and consider feelings of people in the audience. What you have to try and do is that when there is something that could be seen as a transgression, you actually have a reason to justify the joke.

I'm quite good at Lego and Fifa, but they don't translate in the real world.

I think that there's a real appetite for opinion-driven satire, not just generic making jokes about what's in the news but actually point-of-view-driven stuff.

I'm a standup comedian who can't drive. I have never learned. I don't trust my hand-eye coordination. You're looking at someone who once dropped a cricket ball on to his own head during a routine catching practice; I don't think it's a great idea to have me in control of a high-speed metal death robot.

But there comes a landing point, where you finally get to a stage where you have something to hang your hat on. Then your family see that this is definitely happening and you're making a success of it.

I don't feel I'm in competition with anyone. My sense is of it being like school: I don't want to beat anyone but I don't want to get left behind. That's a great motivator. I like impressing my friends.

If you're reaching for a local reference to drop for a place that is typical of everything wrong with Britain, you would switch between Croydon or Bromley. There is a lot of deprivation there, but it's not one of the poorest parts of the country.

When we were growing up we were all asked to accept ourselves as British citizens, and I still hold on to this idea that multicultural Britain is possible.

You always appreciate it when people stick your neck out to support you.

And I can tell you from firsthand experience that our train system is a mess. Carriages are full of unhappy travellers packed together like sardines, who have inexplicably paid for the privilege of being incarcerated.