Quotes from Alexei Sayle

However, my problems with my memory are further complicated by the fact that while I don't have any recollection of things I have actually done, I have very vivid recollections of loads of things that I haven't done.

I wanted to write about how people's beliefs shift.

Recently, my personal advisors have been telling me to go to America. Actually, people have been walking up to me in the street and telling me to sod off, but that's the same thing, isn't it?

If you travel to the States... they have a lot of different words than like what we use. For instance: they say 'elevator', we say 'lift' they say 'drapes', we say 'curtains' they say 'president', we say 'seriously deranged git.'

I've accentuated the look over the years. As a comic, you try something and if it works you go with it and grind it to death.

As a comic, you try something and if it works you go with it and grind it to death.

I have a lot of nice Italian winter clothes that make me look like a sophisticated Lebanese professor, so my friend Robert and I go around pretending to be experts in Arabic politics. It doesn't work in the summer though. I don't have the right clothes.

Pete couldn't believe how sanctimonious somebody could be just because they'd once had a soldering iron stuck up their arse.

Also a fan of being inscrutable, Franco once said, 'You are a the slave of what you say and the master of what you don't say.' He might have added that that approach isn't always guaranteed to work. If you attempt, for example, to be sphinx-like, mysterious and enigmatic when you get to the front of a long queue at the chip shop, you do risk being punched quite hard in the back of the head.

I learned the lesson that, even after the revolution, cool, handsome and confident is always going to beat weird-looking and needy.

football clubs could, at times, be heartless and calculating and weren't to be relied on, unless you wanted your heart broken.

All right, class, now let's bow our heads in prayer and thank God for this milk we're drinking.' At which point I stood up and said, 'No, Miss Wilson, I think you'll find that the milk comes to us via the Milk Marketing Board, a public body set up in 1933 to control the production, pricing and distribution of milk and other dairy products within the UK. It has nothing to do with the intervention of some questionable divine entity.

A Marxist historian would say that industries grew up and remained in an area because there was a plentiful supply of a certain necessary item. The existence of coal and steel in the Midlands led to the engineering industry being based there, a humid climate meant cotton was woven in Lancashire, and finance was located in the City of London because of a plentiful supply of hard-hearted and cruel individuals.

In our neighbourhood you believed the same things as everybody else, you wore the same clothes as everybody else and you planned to go into the same job as your father.

I would have thought it was the sort of house a vampire lived in if I hadn't been aware that vampire stories were superstitious legends designed to subjugate the enslaved rural classes into unquestioning obedience of feudal autocracy.

Never again would the ignorant masses want to take up arms against other nations, or indulge in racism or xenophobia, because instead they had a nice flat with a balcony and underfloor heating.

The public were not to be consulted on whether they wished to have their cities and towns torn down and rebuilt in an entirely original and untested style with no connection to what had gone before.

It's absurd to see people who have spent a lifetime standing against racism, being accused of racism, by racists.

You can't do comedy with a beard.

People used to think I was just a shouty comic but I was doing stuff about Sartre.

I like the south of Spain, notably for the Moorish influence and the weather.

It always seemed to be a constant that my parents were political.

I always thought communism was crap, really.

I'm distinct, really.