Alexei Sayle

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

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 always thought communism was crap, really.

I'm still fiercely ambitious.

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

I'm fascinated by comedy.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Most of the Communists I knew were nice people.

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

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

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

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

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

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'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.

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