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

- Alexei Sayle

I'm an intellectual.

- Alexei Sayle

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

- Alexei Sayle

It seems easier to make a career out of comedy now than it was in the 1980s.

- Alexei Sayle

Most of my friends are women - I quite fancied being a woman in a way.

- Alexei Sayle

Now, as a comic, if you're vaguely amusing you can go straight into TV, then you play the O2 and then everyone's sick of you.

- Alexei Sayle

Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, may have had his charms, but he really couldn't be considered hip.

- Alexei Sayle

I've been going to Granada for many years and 12 years ago bought a house a few miles outside the city.

- Alexei Sayle

I always thought communism was crap, really.

- Alexei Sayle

For me, the showbiz memoir is uninteresting - you want to tell people something they don't know about.

- Alexei Sayle

I don't think I'd ever get thin, but I don't see why I should necessarily think that I couldn't... You can't live your life for your routines.

- Alexei Sayle

I feel really ambiguous about the psychology of people trying to do good in the world.

- Alexei Sayle

I'm sure a psychologist would see something highly significant in how absent-minded I am. I mean I'd forget my head if it wasn't attached to my neck by muscles, ligaments and my esophagus.

- Alexei Sayle

I think that my ideas of the world are that it's random and cruel but kind of quite comical really, and therefore the humour, in a sense, springs from that.

- 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.

- Alexei Sayle

A lot of those comics can't hold down relationships and they've got no other life apart from performing. They sleep in their Jags and a lot of them can't even talk. All they can do is tell gags.

- Alexei Sayle

The optimum frequency with which comedians should do a series is every year. I do one every three years. My audience is literally dying off.

- Alexei Sayle

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

- Alexei Sayle

If sitcoms were easy to write, there'd be a lot of good ones, and there aren't.

- Alexei Sayle

If I won the lottery I'd start a charity that helped little family hardware stores, cobblers and fruit shops open in city centres.

- Alexei Sayle