Alexei Sayle Quotations

Most of the Communists I knew were nice people.

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

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

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 someone starts agreeing with me, I don't like it. Out of pique, I become something else.

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.

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.

Americans have different ways of saying things. They say 'elevator', we say 'lift'... they say 'President', we say 'stupid psychopathic git.

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.

I exist as an annexe of the BBC. I'm down the road a bit from the main building, in a little hut.

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.

Despite its flaws, Marxism still seems to explain the material world better than anything else.

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.

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.

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?

Dire Straits is a great band. Someone tells you they like 'Brothers in Arms' and immediately you know they're a stupid annoying git.

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

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

I liked 35 and in both my novels that is the age of the lead characters. I tried making them my age but they just seemed to keep moaning about stuff.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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 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'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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Dire Straits is a great band. Someone tells you they like ""Brothers in Arms"" and immediately you know they're a stupid annoying git.

I always thought communism was crap, really.

You can't do comedy with a beard.

Even a blind dog can find a bone every so often.

People aren't universally heroic.

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

There's a part of me that still hates everything, and my natural view default setting is still very cynical and dark

Israel is the Jimmy Saville of nation states,

This is the band Radical Posture, and my name is Alexei Yuri Gagarin Siege of Stalingrad Glorious Five-Year Plan Sputnik Pravda Moscow Dynamo Back Four Balowski. Me Dad was a bit of a Communist, know what I mean?

If we look at the nation that President Bush leads, it also behaves in many ways like an addict. The United States is a gigantic John Candy of a country, straining its oversized elasticated pants from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The country is addicted to more or less everything, constantly craving greater and greater quantities of petrol, electricity, pointless sports, empty patriotism, fatty hormone-crammed meat, gigantic pedestrian-crushing four-wheel drive trucks, ever more baseball caps with nonsense written on them and unquestioning obedience from every nation on the planet.

It is no good for somebody in the entertainment business like myself to back romantic, telegenic causes abroad, such as jeopardised tribes' peoples, noble political prisoners, and cute, endangered animals, if you do not also try and do something for the homeless on your own streets. Even if those homeless are at times supremely unpicturesque, occasionally ignoble and not at all cute.

Stand-up has got harder. Now it's all pissed-up hen parties who don't give a monkey's about your routine on the IMF. In the Eighties, comedy really felt like an agent of the revolution.

To know that these intelligent, sensitive animals are mocked, poisoned and even intentionally brain damaged, makes me full of shame.

Anyone who saw the undercover work of the BUAV would be appalled and sickened to see the procedures we inflict on our next of kin in laboratories across the UK and in Europe,