ALEXEI SAYLE

I'm still fiercely ambitious.

I would say I was still a Marxist - which is not to be confused with being a Communist. Despite its flaws, Marxism still seems to explain the material world better than anything else.

I don't think people were that interested in what I was doing for the most of the 1990s.

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.

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

I'm an intellectual.

But as in all cults, what's central to the Communist Party is the belief system and the elimination of nuance. From there you're very slowly led down the road to fanaticism and mass murder.

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

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

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.

I suppose the common idea of me is that I'm going to be someone who's hyper and cracking jokes all the time, but people who meet me are soon disabused of that notion.

Honestly, sometimes I get really fed up of my subconscious - it's like it's got a mind of its own.

You can't do comedy with a beard.

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

I did six series for the BBC and that was enough. I've been writing for ten years, which is more challenging artistically.

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

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.'

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

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

I feel sorry for many politicians... we expect them to be completely consistent and moralised when we're not.

Everyone I used to work with is still alive and can afford expensive lawyers.

People aren't universally heroic.

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.

The journalists have obviously failed to capture my innate magnetism, humour and charisma, and they all need to be fired from their newspapers right away.

First off, I have to mention what is undoubtedly the greatest phenomenon of the modern era: All You Can Eat Buffets.